Message Forum - GENERAL

I'm not a pundit, god knows, but this pundit sounds right to me.

". . . for a crucial slice of the electorate, the comparison was not between Trump and Harris but between memories of the last four years and memories of the pre-COVID years that preceded them. For these voters, Kamala Harris was a reminder of hardships visited on working class families of all kinds by the COVID year and the post-COVID inflation spike that drove up prices on everyday goods such as food, gas and shelter. Trump offered a version of the pre-COVID economy that sounded good by comparison.

"These voters’ focus was and is on the most recent conditions they have to deal with. Their viewpoint on the government is the current government and how it relates to them. That is why such voters talk about the price of eggs so much more often than the fate of Ukraine or perceived threats to democracy." https://www.npr.org/2024/11/09/g-s1-33436/trump-second-term-history-presidents

But nonetheless, as Tolstoy said, "Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it."

**********

Then (late August), and now: the ceramic puppy is a replica of the 2,000 year old Colima figurines found in western Mexican tombs. We aren’t telling Bodie that they represented dogs bred for dinner. Jeez, why do I sound like an archaeologist?

11/11/24 04:07 PM

#17667

Climate Change and AI

Joan’s point on climate change and the United Nation’s summit on climate change opening today is very well taken. Hopefully, her son and others in his group and elsewhere will be able to navigate their way through this political mess, save their jobs and keep the discussion alive on climate change with other countries around the world. We are nearing the breaking point or the point of no return.

The one thing going for us is that Trump leads and governs by chaos — not any strict set of ideas or governing principles. Trump will be so tied up with trying to deport millions of illegal immigrants that it will be hard for him to do anything else. It’s his new wall on the southern border.

Besides that, Trump’s one idea on climate change is: “Drill, baby, drill.” And right now we are producing more oil and natural gas in the U.S. than at any time in our history. That’s the result of the Biden Administration handing out permits to private companies to drill for oil and natural gas on federal land at record rates.

But Joan is right — without the U.S. taking the lead on climate change, it’s going to be impossible to convince the rest of the world to take the hard, necessary steps to combat global warming. That means more disastrous floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heat waves (2024 was the hottest year on record and 2025 is predicted to be even worse), food shortages and other environmental disasters.

I think it is interesting that during the 2024 presidential campaign there was little, if any, discussion on two of the most critical issues facing America and the world: climate change and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on labor markets. AI is likely to replace more than 30 to 45 million American professional and middle income jobs over the next 10 years — making the loss of manufacturing jobs over the past 30 years look like a cake walk.

11/11/24 05:14 PM

#17668

Well, I suppose that no Veterans Day message from the President elect is better than his last year's attack on many Americans as "communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country . . ." Maybe today he could attack our POWs like John McCain again?

I did see this interesting Veterans Day article, date-lined today, from the Saturday Evening Post--which I didn't even know was still around! Odd, in a way, to see this in the magazine 50 or so years after many of the events described. The Saturday Evening Post of that era never covered those events at all, and probably would have covered them very negatively if it had.

At any rate, give it a look to see what he has to say about veterans as “critical patriots." This link worked for me, let me know if not and I’ll cut and paste.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/11/considering-history-the-critical-patriotism-of-vietnam-veterans/

11/11/24 06:53 PM

#17669

At COP29, the Sun Sets on

U.S. Climate Leadership

By Elizabeth Kolbert/The New Yorker

Nov. 11, 2024

On Monday, a new round of international climate talks will open in Azerbaijan, a country that earns ninety per cent of its export income selling fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at things, this situation is either farcical or grimly appropriate. Last week, in the run-up to the conference, Copernicus, the earth-observation arm of the European Union, reported that global temperatures this year will, for the first time, average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. Also last week, the United States elected a climate denier as President.

“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia,” Donald Trump crowed in his victory speech, apparently referring to oil. (According to most reliable sources, including the C.I.A., America’s oil reserves are actually only one-seventh the size of Saudi Arabia’s.) In response to Trump’s election, Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, declared the U.S. a nascent “petrostate” and predicted that the country “will, in short order, join an alliance of petrostate bad actors” to “block meaningful progress” on climate change.

Every year, before the start of the annual climate negotiating session, or cop—short for Conference of the Parties—the United Nations Environment Programme (unep) issues an “emissions gap” report. This year’s report was titled “No More Hot Air . . . Please!” and it makes for dispiriting reading. Most countries’ emissions-reductions pledges are inadequate and, in any event, they have failed to meet them. As a result, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—a goal agreed to at the cop held in Paris in 2015—has, for all practical purposes, become impossible. (The goal refers to the long-term temperature average, so, technically speaking, one year above the limit does not yet mean it’s been breached.) Without a huge international effort, the chance to limit warming to two degrees Celsius will also soon slip away.

“Ambition means nothing without action,” the report noted. The emissions-gap report was followed by the “adaptation gap” report, also from unep, which estimates that developing countries will need at least two hundred and thirty billion dollars a year to adapt to the climate-change-related disasters that are already taking place. “Everyone must deal with the devastation caused when climate impacts strike,” Inger Andersen, unep’s executive director, wrote in the foreword to the report. “But it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer most.”

The focus of this year’s cop, the twenty-ninth, is supposed to be on money; the meeting has been dubbed the “finance cop.” The big issue is how much wealthy countries, which are responsible for most of the emissions now warming the planet, are willing to pay to bridge the “adaptation gap” and also to help poorer ones build clean-energy infrastructure. The money was always going to be hard to raise, and now it will be that much more difficult. The U.S., which is the world’s largest emitter on a cumulative basis and the second-largest on an annual basis, after China—has long been reluctant to cough up what other countries see as its fair share. But, in recent years, President Joe Biden has tried to increase international climate aid, and in Azerbaijan, the U.S. and the European Union were hoping to press China and rich Persian Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia, to start contributing funds. Now, with Trump poised to take over, the U.S. has lost what little leverage it may have had. “The U.S. at this cop is not just a lame duck, it’s a dead duck,” Richard Klein, an expert on climate-change policy for the Stockholm Environment Institute, recently told the BBC.

In his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. The day Biden took office, he moved to reënter the agreement. Trump in his second term almost certainly will withdraw from the accord once again. And it’s possible that the new Administration could take the even more radical step of withdrawing from the treaty that underlies the Paris Agreement, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992. Leaving the U.N.F.C.C.C. would make it virtually impossible for the country to rejoin because the move would require approval by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.

Just how bad a second Trump Administration will be for domestic climate policy remains, of course, to be seen, but the most likely scenarios are all pretty bleak. During his first term, Trump tried to roll back more than a hundred environmental regulations. And, while the Biden Administration is rushing to try to “Trump-proof” various rules, including a set aimed at limiting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, this seems unlikely to deter the incoming President, who, through his own nominees, has produced a U.S. Supreme Court deeply sympathetic to his agenda. According to a recent analysis by the British-based Web site Carbon Brief, were Trump to roll back the Biden Administration’s key climate initiatives, the U.S. could emit an extra four billion tons of CO2 by 2030. This, the analysis noted, “would negate—twice over—all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”

At a dinner in the spring, Trump reportedly told oil-company executives that they should contribute a billion dollars to his campaign and that doing so would represent a good “deal” for them. Following the dinner, the American Exploration and Production Council drew up a kind of wish list for a possible Republican Administration. According to the Washington Post, which obtained the plan, the group was particularly intent on repealing a new fee designed to reduce emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. (Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, and it’s often released, both intentionally and accidentally, in the process of gas extraction.)

The methane fee was approved as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Administration’s signature climate achievement. Trump has said that he wants to cancel any “unspent” funding authorized by the act. Here, though, it’s unclear whether he will have congressional support. A good deal of the more than sixty billion dollars that have already been distributed under the I.R.A., to, for example, spur battery- and electric-vehicle manufacturing, has gone to red states, and in August, eighteen Republican representatives wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to maintain the I.R.A.’s clean-energy tax credits. “Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference,” the group said.

Many experts predict that a second Trump Administration will slow but not stop the country’s transition to cleaner sources of energy, owing to economic forces beyond the President’s control. Since Trump’s first inauguration, the price of solar power has fallen by more than half, and the cost of installing a utility-scale solar or onshore wind farm is now significantly less than that of building a new gas-fired generating plant. As Dan Lashof, the U.S. director of the World Resources Institute, recently put it, “Donald Trump heading back to the White House won’t be a death knell to the clean energy transition that has rapidly picked up pace these last four years.” Still, as the planet blows beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius and the toll of climate-related disasters mounts—see September’s Hurricane Helene, or October’s devastating floods in Spain, or the fires burning over the weekend in New York, New Jersey, and Southern California—slowing progress could well be enough to assure catastrophe. The U.S., not to mention the rest of the world, is long past the point when it can afford to give itself extra time. And yet, here we are. ♦

11/11/24 10:19 PM

#17670

Joan Ruggles (Young)

Thanks Jay for drawing attention to COP29. This is super important!

11/12/24 06:35 AM

#17671

It Can Happen Here

By Dave Remnick, Editor, The New Yorker

On the morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about “deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails. But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.

Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring autocrat did not spell the end of America’s long, if profoundly imperfect, experiment in liberal democracy. History does not move in straight lines, he told them. Sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. It was a solemn, pastoral performance, and, on some level, Obama was also engaged in a form of self-soothing. Two days later, in an interview with The New Yorker, he again tried to keep despair at bay: “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

Privately, Obama, the first Black man elected to the White House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “come along too soon.” A generational political talent, he had deployed the resonant language and narrative of the civil-rights movement (“the fierce urgency of now”) to promote broad-based reforms, particularly the Affordable Care Act. His residence in a house built by enslaved Black men and women seemed to suggest, if hardly an end to American racism, then surely a significant advance for the idea of a multiethnic democracy. But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unmistakable reaction—a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American story. The system was “rigged,” Trump told his followers. Foreign leaders were “laughing at us.” The country was a hellscape of ominous “illegal aliens,” “rapists,” gang members, and psychotics from faraway prisons and asylums. “American carnage” was his assessment of the country, and only he could set things right.

Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the President was in Lima, Peru, being driven to an event with some of his aides. Along the way, he confided that he’d just read an opinion column implying that, in electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

In 2016, Trump’s election could be ascribed to many things, including a failure of the collective imagination. How had a figure who combined the traits of George Wallace, Hulk Hogan, and Father Charles Coughlin managed to win the Presidency? Just as Obama struggled to understand the social and political roots of Trumpism, many Americans failed to grasp fully his character, the dimensions of his malevolence. It was impossible for them to absorb just what a threat he posed to international alliances and domestic institutions, how contemptuous he was of the truth, science, the press, and so many of his fellow-citizens. Surely, his most extreme rhetoric was an act. Surely, he would “grow into the office.”

Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, a fascist. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone. Instead, he pretended to fellate a microphone and threatened to direct the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself, as if to say, “Forget the scripted stuff on the teleprompter. Listen to me when I go off-the-cuff. The conspiracy theories. The fury. The vengeance. The race-baiting. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m weaving!”

In the end, there was nothing Trump would not say, no invective or insult he would not hurl. At Madison Square Garden, he gave the platform over to supporters who spoke grotesquely about Puerto Rico, Jews, trans people—no indecency was impermissible. His most distinctive television ad was pure cruelty: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” His disdain for women, which has been in evidence all his adult life, was only amplified in the last weeks of the campaign, when, in Michigan, he said of Nancy Pelosi, “She’s an evil, sick, crazy bi— It starts with a ‘B,’ but I won’t say it. I want to say it.”

Trump was equally brazen about policy. There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of nato. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.

The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos represented by Trump.

Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next, the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic advantages.

How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken. The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically broken.

Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.

That is one imperative. There is another. After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of gloom, it will be time to consider what must be done, assuming that Trump follows through on his most draconian pledges. One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.

An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy. All that matters is power and self-interest. The rest is sanctimony and hypocrisy. Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an episode.

One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here. ♦

11/15/24 06:14 AM

#17672

The Onion buys Infowars, pledges to turn it into a satirical vehicle with which to attack the right-wing nutters. RFK Jr. whose "baseless claims have included that Wi-Fi causes cancer and 'leaky brain'; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender; and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. He's also long said that vaccines cause autism and fail to protect people from diseases" will be encouraged by Trump to "go wild" as Secretary of Health and Human Services; Matt Gaetz, with some as yet unknown connection to child trafficking (17 year old girl?) and illicit drug use will be Attorney General. The new Secretary of Defense has almost exactly the same experience in national security issues that I do.

And this from Andy Borowitz:

Well, the next four years look like good times for satirists, political cartoonists, and late-night television. SOMEBODY benefits!

*********

But meanwhile . . .

11/17/24 08:52 PM

#17673

Thanks for printing Maureen Dowd's piece dated Nov. 9th, Jay. I knew much of which she cited but to see her observations listed concisely was truly impactful.

11/19/24 03:14 PM

#17674

How odd that "enemies from within' like Mika Brzezinski & hubby Joe Scarborough would be welcomed to Mar-a-Lago for 90 minutes of cordial visitation. What would they be thinking? To visit a known "fascist who threatens the return of Naziism and the end of democracy" is just head scratching, isn't it? Could it be they are scared sh*tless by Trump's impending retribution? Or that MSNBC ratings are THAT low? Or a combination? It can't possibly be that they want smoother communication with the 'head honcho' over the next four years, could it? Do tell. Inquiring minds.....

11/20/24 04:47 PM

#17675

Nori, I think you are right as Trump has said he will shut down MSNBC and arrest his political enemies from within. I think Joe and Mika are scared. He plans to use the military on his perceived enemies which is against the Constitution. He plans to deport thousands of hard working immigrants disrupting families by calling up the military. Last time he let cruel Stephen Miller's policy to separate families happen. Can you imagine Nori a mother holding her baby and the baby is taken away from her arms and in some cases lost forever. His choices except for Rubio and maybe Radcliff are a joke. Matt Gaetz for Justice. Hmm. Matt wants revenge. He is accused of having sex with an underage girl and other things not worthy of an Attorney General. The Defense guy is accused of sexual assault and paid the person off. Tulsi likes Putin and Assad. Wow what a choice for director of National intelligence. Yes Trump is trying to disband the government and Advise and Consent of the Senate and change the status of gov workers so he can fire them and put in sycophants. HE WANTS ALL THE POWER for himself. So Nori yes he is an authoritarian dictator. Sorry so many don't realize the harm that awaits our country. Love, Joanie

11/21/24 09:23 AM

#17676

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president.html

In trying times,we look for comfort where we can find it. As of this morning (11/21 at 8:34 am), with about 98.8% of votes counted, the majority of American voters did NOT vote for Trump.

11/21/24 12:45 PM

#17677

For the record, Joanie, my previous post was tongue-in-cheek. Sorry. I do not for a moment think that Trump and/or Tom Holman and/or Steve Miller or BP or ICE is going to snatch babies from their mothers and send them anywhere. What I do hope to see happen is that the lists of folks who have criminal records, present a terror threat, have connections to gangs/drug cartels/sex traffickers will be escorted out of the country. Perhaps they can reapply for reentry if they so desire (much like everybody else who must enter legally). When those lists are dealt with, others may have to go. Asylum seekers range hugely with varying reasons why they come, what they seek and from where they travel. We, the people voted for a secure border, were told it WAS secure (when it wasn't!) and no one should be surprised that this administration will deliver changes necessary to appease an angry public who does not appreciate being lied to about such an important issue. As for Mika and Joe, who the heck cares what they think!? I hope you're right, though. If they're scared, that's a good sign that enemies of our country are scared. If others are alarmed by the magnitude of Trump's power, perhaps our opponents likewise, will be alarmed. Peace through strength still has a nice ring to it for some of us.

As for Trump's cabinet choices: it is not for me (or you) to decide eligibility. That duty belongs to the Senate and there are 'advise and consent' processes in place, including recess appointments which have been plentiful through the years, beginning with George Washington. I will, however, be watching pertinent confirmation hearings, and then be armed with more palpable reasons to bolster opinion. Whether a choice is qualified or not, is only Trump's decision, as it should be. Does anybody think Buttigieg was qualified for Transportation Secretary? Other reasons apparently were important to Biden in making that choice. If Trump thinks loyalty to carry out his vision is first and foremost, then so be it. Apparently we, the people, wanted him to choose, and choose, he did.

11/21/24 03:03 PM

#17678

Another Four Years of Lying

By Dead-Center Shacks

Nov. 21, 2024

A couple of days after the election, Donald Trump was addressing the House Republican Caucus that narrowly held on to its slim majority in the House of Representatives. Taking it all in during his victory lap, President-elect Trump was thrilled with himself and did what he does best — he lies even when he doesn’t have to lie by claiming he won the popular vote by 7.5 million votes that gave him a huge mandate to go after the deep state and reconstruct our government.

I had to laugh, recalling George W. Bush’s comments after his win against John Kerry in 2004, claiming he had won big-time political capital and he planned to spend it. He did indeed do that, escalating the war in Iraq, which will go down in history as the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.

Anyway you look at it, the 2024 election was close — real close. Trump won the electoral college by 312 to 226. But that margin leaves one with a false impression of what really happened on Nov. 5. We really need to get rid of the Electoral College.

Trump narrowly won the seven battleground states, but the margin was razor thin and all within the margin of error — 49.7% to 48.2% in Michigan, 49.6% to 48.8% in Wisconsin, 50.7% to 48.5% in Georgia and 50.4% to 48.6% in Pennsylvania where the race for the U.S. Senate seat is undergoing a mandatory recount.

In addition, Senate Democratic candidates won in five of the seven battleground states. In Georgia, there was no Senate race and there is a mandatory recount in Pennsylvania.

In the seven red states where abortion was on the ballot, abortion rights were restored in six states. In the seventh, Florida that required a 60% vote, it fell short with 57% of the vote.

Looking at the popular vote — the vote Trump was bragging about to House Republicans — he beat Kamala by about 2.5 million votes — less than Hillary Clinton’s 3 million vote margin in 2016 and Joe Biden’s 7 million popular vote margin in 2020.

So this wasn’t a landslide election. Far from it. Actually, I’m with former President Bill Clinton and James Carville believing that we lost during the last couple of weekends before the election when Republicans ran $30 million worth of their ads blasting Kamala as superstar supporter of transgender kids where you would send your boys to school and they would some home as girls. Come on!!!

Instead of combatting those “Willie Horton” type ads, the Harris campaign decided to put themselves above the fray and remain quiet. That’s where I have a real problem with my Democratic Party. I believe we should compete on a level playing field. If the GOP wants to play dirty, we should play dirtier.

That means we should have put together ads featuring Donald Trump at his best featuring:

his “grab them by the pussy” remarks on AXIOS;
making fun of a disabled reporter who asked him an embarrassing question during one of his few press briefings;
his comment about drinking Clorox to fight Covid;
a clip from his Stormy Daniels hush money trial where he was convicted of 34 felonies;
a photo of him falling asleep at his E. Jean Carroll sexual assault libel trial where the the judge said he was guilty of rape;
a clip of Trump calling veterans “suckers and losers” and calling for the execution of four-star General Mark Milley who served as his chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff; and
Trump’s answer during his one debate with Kamala of what his health plan would look like if he dumped ObamaCare — “I don’t have a plan but I have a concept of a plan.
”We should have purchased $60 million worth of those type of ads (doubling the GOP buy) during NFL games in the final four weeks of the campaign. My punch line would have been: “Do you really want this guy to serve another term as President of the United States.”

Democrats need to quit whining and toughen up. We now need to take a page out of Mitch McConnell’s playbook and get ready to oppose every proposal and/or action proposed by the incoming Trump Administration and get ready for the 2026 elections.

(For those of you who might have forgotten, the day after Barack Obama won in 2008, Mitch gathered with GOP House and Senate leaders for dinner at the Capitol Grill where they all pledged to do everything possible to oppose everything the nation’s first black President tried to do.)

11/21/24 04:54 PM

#17679

Another 4 years of lying? Like that's something only under Trump? Seriously? Interesting that you would want your party to follow that tired old Mitch McConnell playbook, Jay. Why? Did you believe Mitch was correct? (What became of Kamala's mantra, 'we ain't going back!) When KLP was pressed about concerns of Joe Biden seen wandering off in front of world leaders, did you believe her myth that that was a 'cheap fake' and Biden could "run circles around" everybody in the WH? Did you believe that the border was secure when Mayorkas claimed as such earlier this year? Did you believe Kamala Harris when she claimed that the economy was good? When Biden said to a Black host, "if you don't vote Democrat, you ain't Black"? When Harris also said she would not change a thing that Biden did? That, though she was staunchly against fracking in 2019, she had magically changed her position as she campaigned? Did you believe that Hollywood types were performing and appearing for free (because of liberal beliefs?) and then found out that millions upon millions of donor dollars had lined Opra and Beyonce's (etal) pockets? Gawd knows, I could go on and on. Apparently most voters chose to think that Jan. 6th was a riot, not an insurrection, that the ongoing litigation against Trump was executed for political gain, that times were better when Trump was in office. You're entitled to your own beliefs, for sure, if for no other reason than "people can believe what they wish, this in no way harms me or anyone else" (as claimed recently by Jack Mallory), but honestly Jay, are you kidding? So much for Kamala's "turn the page". Trump hasn't even begun his term and you are opting to choose chaos and total resistance, citing age-old (some debunked) garbage from the 2020 election? You might want to revisit this old addage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. As Bill Mayer recently professed, "losers look in the mirror."

11/21/24 09:38 PM

#17680

Manicures and Pedicures

Hey Nori, what happened. You should be happy. You won the election and got your three Supreme Court justices, giving you a big win on what used to be your number one issue — abortion and reversing Roe. Now you’ve got young women and teenagers bleeding out in hospital parking lots in Texas and other red states. Then your guy won the presidency — the first ever twice impeached, convicted felon and known sexual predator to be elected as President of the United States.

But judging from your recent posts, something is just not right. I’m wondering what happened to that sweet old gal who used to take her winters off traveling around Florida and the Caribbean? You used to post pictures lying on the beach showing off those beautiful legs. You didn’t seem to have a care in the world. You used to brag about what a wonderful life you had. Now it appears you don’t have enough money to get your pedicures and manicures and have taken to eating plain old spaghetti every night because of the “Biden” depression. Things are so bad you might even have to ask you kids for support. What happened?

Quoting directly from your August 20, 2024 post, you wrote:

“Asking myself if I were better off before Biden/Harris, I do know this about 4 1/2 years ago (very clever choice of years: Biden’s term started 3 1/2 years ago from August during the second year of the Covid pandemic; 4 1/2 years ago was Trump’s last month in office right before the pandemic started). I had approximately the same amount of money but could buy more fun things (like ice cream and a steak), afford a resort trip periodically, drive without regard to gas prices, treat my grandies to a ball game or flick, even donate more to good causes.

“Today, every purchase must be weighed out and thought through. More home cooked pasta, less (fewer, I think you mean) side entrees w/sides. Cheaper paper products. Less (let’s make it fewer) manicures and pedicures. 15% tips instead of 20%. Less (fewer) haircuts. Less lawn service. No housecleaners. Less (I give up) home products. Lumber is ridiculous. Cologne is a luxury. God forbid you need an attorney, a shrink, an architect. Fees are off the charts. And there is a growing fear in the back of my mind that I might have to someday rely on my kids to make ends meet.”

Lordy, that was a mouthful — can’t afford to have someone (probably a recent immigrant) to clean your house or work on your fingers and toes. What’s the world come to? You actually have to run the vacuum cleaner and clip your own nails. Life is tough.

But don’t worry — you will get trumped by Trump. Matt Gaetz — another sexual predator— is toast and he’s nominating a young blonde as his new attorney general — Pam Bondi, the attorney general for Florida— who showed up at his recent trials in New York— I guess standing in for Ivanka who is rarely seen these days. Talk about missing in action — where’s Melania?

11/21/24 10:21 PM

#17681

Joan Ruggles (Young)

Let me get this straight. Among Trump's nominees is a guy nominated for Attorney General accused of paying minors for sex and drugs Thank God somebody got him to withdraw….from the nomination

Then there’s the would-be Secretary of Defence who paid off a woman who accused him of rape - oh and he believes women should not be in combat - Tammy Duckworth has something to say about that as well as the 229,000 women in the military. Use of military for mass deportations? He’s okay with that. Use of the military for domestic uprisings? - He loves that too. “Top gun maverick” His words. A department with a budget of $925 BILLION - the largest department in the world. This guy should run it?

And don't get me started on the conspiracy theorist who wants to deprive our children/grandchildren of vaccines that have saved millions of lives.

There's no point going into the other nominations which are all a poke in the eye to his opponents. Okay, that's fine but this isn't about revenge. It's about ruling the most powerful country in the world. All these nominees have one thing in common. Trump has watched them all on TV which for him confirms their competence.

But wait, despite all that, Nori thinks it’s more important to talk about Joe & Mika going to Mar a Lago for tea. Wha? Aside from the fact that it’s the least important news in our world, there’s also the fact that those 2 scumbags have been enablers and normalizers of Trump since 2016 when they had him on the phone 5 times a week on their show. I admit, I've never watched their show nor will I, but they see where their future lies, so going to Mar a Lago and kissing the butt/ring is their only way to appear relevant. Trump understands that and will welcome their kissing.

After enduring the 5 stages of grief, I've come to acceptance. I want Trump to do everything he's promised us. You go, Donny!. Do everything you've promised! Let loose with the tariffs, the deportations, the assaults on the media, and anyone who disagrees with you. Do it all!!! I guess some who voted for Trump might say - Wait, that's not what I voted for! Trump is a lame-duck president. He doesn't have to please anyone. He knows that. And he will act accordingly.

And don't forget to fire my son and his wife. She's pregnant.

11/22/24 10:21 AM

#17682

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president.html

Joan, if I could sue you for reading my mind and posting its contents without attribution, I would! But thanks especially for the first paragraph chuckle.

Yes, honor to Tammy Duckworth, my student Aggie who was a medic with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, and thousands of other women who have seen far more combat than 99% of Americans, with or without bone spurs. And f--- anyone, veteran or not, who denigrates their service.

"women can serve as combat medics in the U.S. Army. The Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) for combat medics is 68W, known as the Combat Medic Specialist. This role is open to both men and women who meet the necessary qualifications.

"Historically, women have served as combat medics and have earned respect for their contributions. For instance, in 2007, female combat medics were recognized for their service alongside Afghan Army units, providing medical support during missions and earning Combat Medical Badges for their work under fire.

"The U.S. military has progressively integrated women into various combat roles. In 2013, the Department of Defense lifted the ban on women serving in combat positions, allowing them to serve in front-line combat and complete combat operations. This policy change has enabled women to serve in roles such as combat medics, infantry, and other positions that were previously restricted.

"As of 2024, the participation of women in military combat roles has been increasing. In traditionally male-only artillery, infantry, and armor units, thousands of women now serve. The Army has nearly 4,800 women in these jobs, including over 2,020 in field artillery, more than 902 in infantry, and 864 in armor roles, showing a steady increase over the years.

"In summary, women are eligible and actively serve as combat medics in the U.S. Army, reflecting the military’s commitment to integrating women into all aspects of service."

From a ChatGPT AI search. Not sure how to reference, although references are included in the Chat GPT response.

********

And Jay--Miss Monte, Miss Casey and I thank you for your less/fewer correction! And for your concern with Nori's fiscal well-being under the ravages of the Biden economy.

******

As of this morning, with only 1.1% of votes still to be counted or reported, Trump still fails to have the majority support of American voters.
Mandate?

11/22/24 02:02 PM

#17683

Tammy Duckworth to Hegseth and his remarks about women's unsuitability for combat: "Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight?"

I personally don't think human beings in general are suitable for combat. We come apart all too easily. Let's keep EVERYBODY out of combat!

11/22/24 02:17 PM

#17684

Nori, you must have missed the recent times that the strictest border bill ever was agreed on that the border patrol thought was great. It was worked on by a bipartisan group. However your guy Trump told them to kill it because he wouldn't have it for an issue to run on. He is lucky to have such loyalists as you who are even ok with him appointing sexual assaulters, and doing mass deportations. even for the Dreamers. Did you forget Nori that last time with the cruel horrid Steve Miller at the helm children were ripped from their parents arms. Trump is lucky to have such loyal followers as you. Biden is a great President. He really cares about this country unlike Trump who cares only for himself and revenge against his perceived enemies. Love, Joanie

11/22/24 09:30 PM

#17685

Joan Ruggles (Young)

I got a few photos sent to me by my son who's at the COP29 UN Climate Confernce in Azerbiajan of the team working on the last day to try to come agreement with all 200 countries. It's not glamorous. Just a bunch of peolple in folding chairs in a big conference room. So very very sad that this will be the last time the US will be a participent for the next four years. Is this what you voted for? I guess so.

11/22/24 10:10 PM

#17686

It is sad Joan. Your son is doing such good work to help our climate. Yes people voted for someone bent on wrecking it and so much more that is good in the country. Love, Joanie

11/23/24 09:49 AM

#17687

The Explosion of Matt Gaetz and

Other Lessons in Trump 2.0

By Susan Glasser/The New Yorker

Nov. 21, 2024

That was fast. Barely two weeks after winning reëlection, Donald Trump has already so thoroughly owned the news cycle that I’m not sure anyone even recalls that Joe Biden is still President. (It was his eighty-second birthday on Wednesday, by the way.) One of the themes of this year’s campaign was the apparent mass amnesia among many Americans of just what the Trump Presidency was like. Every day since Trump won has been a crash course in remembering: the cryptic all-caps social-media posts at all hours, containing major government announcements; the erratic decision-making that stuns even his most senior advisers; the casual shattering of norms, rules, and traditions, any one of which would have provoked days of controversy for another politician. Scandals were endemic to the first Trump Presidency. But this many? In just the first two weeks of an incoming Administration? No, there is no precedent.

Consider this sampling of CNN headlines from Thursday morning: “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault claim against Hegseth”; “Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education pick, was sued for allegedly enabling sexual abuse of children”; “New document details the trail of payments Gaetz made to women.” The metastasizing plotlines forced impossible choices. Should you spend your time trying to decipher the leaked chart from the Matt Gaetz sex-trafficking investigation, the one with all the complicated lines tracing Venmo payments between Trump’s would-be Attorney General and women he allegedly compensated for sex? Or reading the twenty-two-page police report documenting the allegations of a woman who says that she was sexually assaulted at a Republican conference in California a few years back by Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host chosen by Trump as Secretary of Defense? As pure distraction, it was hard to beat the video playing in an endless social-media loop of McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, dressed in business attire, appearing to violently slap her own daughter, all in good fun, of course. Which was enough to divert from reports that McMahon, Trump’s nominee to head an Education Department that he pledged on the campaign trail to eliminate, once falsely claimed to have a college degree in education.

At such a moment, it was hard to even remember the other Trump outrages. R.F.K., Jr., Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, seeking to ban fluoride from the water and undermining public confidence in lifesaving vaccines? So last week. (Though I missed a few updates in the past few days on the Kennedy front, including a former babysitter for his children speaking out publicly about how Kennedy sexually accosted her and the revelation that Kennedy previously compared Trump to Hitler and praised descriptions of his supporters as “outright Nazis.”) On Tuesday, Trump named Sean Duffy, a former congressman from Wisconsin turned lobbyist, as his choice for Transportation Secretary. Duffy, who has no known experience in the transportation sector, is a Fox News contributor; when Trump announced the pick, he praised Duffy’s “STAR” wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who, along with Hegseth, is a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” If confirmed, Duffy will be the first Cabinet member to have been on the cast of MTV’s “The Real World.” On Wednesday, it was reported that Trump was expected to choose Russell Vought, his first-term budget director, to return to his post as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Vought is a chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the radical nine-hundred-page agenda for a second Trump term that Trump repeatedly disavowed during the campaign. By the Washington Post’s count, Vought is the fifth senior Trump nominee who has been credited by name as a contributor to Project 2025. The other four are Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar”; John Ratcliffe, his choice to run the C.I.A.; Pete Hoekstra, his nominee for Ambassador to Canada; and Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on transforming the Federal Communications Commission, which Trump now wants him to lead.

But there was little time to consider the implications. By lunchtime on Thursday, Gaetz announced that he was withdrawing from consideration as Attorney General. In a statement on X, Gaetz, who had long been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, complained “that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition” at a moment when “there is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.” Soon after, CNN reported that the Ethics Committee had been told of a second, previously unknown, alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a seventeen-year-old. (Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.) Was this, one instantly wondered, what had prompted his sudden announcement? Or, was it instead, the brutal math he faced in the Senate, where it appeared there were at least four Republicans implacably opposed to his confirmation, the magic number required to sink him? Coming a mere sixteen days after the election, Gaetz’s retreat was the fastest-collapsed Cabinet nomination in modern history. By Thursday evening, Trump had already anointed a new appointee, one with presumably more surmountable controversies: Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida.

Trump overwhelms. He exhausts. Back in 2018, that was one of the original impetuses for this column—as a response to the condition of not being able to remember by Thursday the deeply upsetting things that Trump had done on Tuesday. The first couple of weeks of Trump redux suggest that this will be even more the case during his second four years in office. Yet it is striking how little having lived through it before provides in the way of wisdom for how to navigate the onslaught once again. Tuning out will be the answer for many, I suspect—an understandable response, but hardly a desirable one, at least from the point of view of democracy’s survival. Remember all that earnest discussion about “deplatforming” Trump in 2021? A certain number of liberals probably slept better at night as a result. But if the assumption was that Trump was a spent force in American politics, or that excluding him from front-page coverage would somehow erase his political appeal to a large swath of the population, well, that was not correct.

If anything, I fear we’ve collectively slipped right back into the status quo ante-Biden. There’s a muscle memory to it; after all, it’s only been four years. During Trump’s first term, I found that one of the benefits of having covered Washington for so long was the ability to observe when Trump was departing from the accepted playbook of past Presidents—when he was actually making history, as opposed to merely infuriating his many critics in extreme but still familiar ways. This time, that challenge remains, but is compounded greatly by his much more explicit agenda of blowing up the federal government, of revenge and retribution, of seizing power for himself and an ever-more-unconstrained White House. Trump 1.0 was a test for the system, but it was also a trial for an inexperienced leader who had the inclination of a wrecking ball but often lacked the capacity or the cadres to follow through; Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again.

Will Trump overreach with more Matt Gaetzes? Undoubtedly. Will he be able to find a way despite narrow Republican majorities on Capitol Hill to pass some of his more extreme proposals into law? Probably so. But no one can yet say for sure what will happen if Trump actually follows through on threats to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, or tanks the economy by imposing across-the-board tariffs on goods from all our major trading partners. My fear, for now, is a different one: that the stories we don’t have time to scream about amid all the other outrages could end up being the most outrageous ones of all.

Consider that, in just the past few days, while the investigative reporters were doing the grim, necessary work of digging up the personal skeletons that Gaetz and Co. preferred to hide, there were also reports about Trump’s decision to flout federal ethics and conflict-of-interest rules; his refusal to subject some appointees to the customary F.B.I. background checks; his plan to set up a new board to vet military generals for political reliability; and his decision to vest sweeping unauthorized and unaccountable authority in a new commission, co-headed by his campaign benefactor Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to recommend cuts of up to two trillion dollars in the national budget.

Eight years into Trump, none of us can honestly claim to have figured out how to cover Trump. I certainly have not. We’re all worn out, and he hasn’t even been inaugurated, again, yet. At such a time, perhaps moving to Canada is an appropriate response. I haven’t ruled anything out. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing it all down. I don’t need a catchy slogan. It’s another Thursday in the Trump era, and a lot of crazy shit has happened. ♦

11/23/24 12:22 PM

#17688

I think that what motivates people's votes is their understanding of what most directly benefits them and their "people"--families, friends, folks like them.

Prices, jobs, wages, rent/mortgage, drive most votes. It's the economy. My thinking here is influenced directly by the cultural materialist orientation in anthropology and at the root (Aha! You knew it all along) by Marx--and also by what I've learned in life. Material realities are the essential influence on social behavior. My thinking doesn't produce what I claim to be an empirically irrefutable conclusion, but a gut level 78 year-old understanding of the world.

Very few individuals choose their votes based on issues that only indirectly affect their lives. Most of us, myself included, have at best a pretty limited and simplistic understanding of economics--or climatology. Very few people vote around economic issues other than what's in their wallet vs. what needs to be in their wallet, or over participation in global climate planning.

Voters are prioritizing what they think most directly benefit them. I don't think they vote to punish immigrants because they hate immigrants. But if they conceive a benefit to their families by restricting immigration, reducing numbers of immigrants competing with them for jobs or housing or space in classrooms they vote accordingly. They don't vote over % changes in inflation, or tariffs (WTF's a tariff?), they vote over dinner and roofs over their heads tonight.

People, all of us, vote on our understanding of our lives. That understanding is based on our perception of reality, potentially affected by political lies and distortions, ignorance and irrational thinking, and can produce unexpected outcomes. Votes may produce war, inflation, global warming, homelessness, educational inequity, a multitude of ills, but they weren't votes FOR these ills. They were votes intended to do what voters thought was the "right thing" for themselves, their families, their "people,"

People don't vote the way they do because they're Democrats or Republicans, rednecks or libtards, Trumpublicans or commies. They vote out of perceived self-interest, in a sense broader than absolute individualism. I think this is an evolved--biologically and culturally--human adaptation, which influences us all, regardless of ideology.

What I like about this understanding is first that I think it fits what I know about human history and culture, and second that it assumes we all are basically motivated by the same interests/desires. We needn't posit that the "others" believe what they do because they're enemies within, or racists, or vermin, or extremists or idiots. Believe me, I often have to work at believing this! It's so much easier to assume that "they" don't think what I think because they're fundamentally different from me, rather than to assume they're fundamentally the same but adapting to different circumstances with different values created by such circumstances, and by the same flawed thinking I'm susceptible to.

Again, not claiming my understanding is the Truth, but a kind of informed, eight decades old perspective on the little t/unbolded/unitalicized/ununderlined truth from my perspective.

11/23/24 05:28 PM

#17689

Not to ignore you, Jay, but in answer to your question, I think it might have been "Bidenomics' that happened.

Joan, I feel bad for your son and his wife. You've conveyed how very important the work done by COP29 has been. Please educate us as to how it has helped shape (& improve?) climate change. Thanks.

As for cabinet picks: as previously indicated, confirmation hearings will shine lights on these people. 'Til then, who knows?

Currently, however, Biden's allowing US missiles to be used by Ukraine, thereby effecting change in Putin's nuclear strategy, seems worthy of discussion. Also, any thoughts re the ICC rendering Netanyahu be arrested and the (ever apolitical?) Pope's call to investigate Israel for genocide in Gaza?

11/24/24 07:57 AM

#17690