I write a lot about how the Biden-Harris administration is working to restore the principles of the period between 1933 and 1981, when members of both political parties widely shared the belief that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights.
Indeed, let’s fight every day until Nov5. We can’t get NO Satisfaction unless we save our Democracy! You all really can help by helping brilliant Harvard students who are registering thousands of seniors in more than 1,500 high schools and 348 Community Colleges only in 78 truly competitive Congressional Districts and 16 Senate elections based exclusively on protecting reproductive rights, gun safety and fighting climate change. Please go to www.TurnUp.US and contribute generously as this is a tax deductible C3 contribution! They are the real thing folks! Thank you!
I fear that we will be fighting for decades to come, to protect and expand democracy to all Americans, as the reactionaries and supremacists have infiltrated our town, state and federal governments, so that at all levels we are being governed by corrupt people subject to bribery. So gird your loins, sharpen your swords and words, and sally forth.
Lynn, infiltrate is an excellent word to describe what the wing nuts are doing: all those political entities plus school boards and county governments.
I think that's what Benjamin Franklin was speaking about when he said, '…a republic, if you can keep it.' Having a say in government is not a one and done deal -- it's a lifelong commitment for better or for worse, etc. The depiction of politics as something too rough for women or too complicated or corrupt for the average citizen is designed to thwart any efforts to be involved. Now, the fascists add violence to the mix -- something from the days when 'the rule of law' was not the standard, when might made right. Primitive and effective, especially when they create fear or distrust or disgust -- whatever makes people give up wanting to be citizens, wanting to vote even.... Like the Ukrainians, we can never let up -- we will never be perfect, but we can never stop our efforts.
I just finished “ all the Shahs Men “ by Stephen Kinzer which outlines how British and American interests in Iranian oil over threw a democratically elected government and laid the groundwork for the current Islamic state. I find it ironic that Trump is trying to overthrow our democracy via bribes for oil as well.
Money talks. In every language. The Russian Orthodox Church doesn't seem to be motivated by Christianity.... Makes me recall the song from "Cabaret" with its lurid sensationalism of the vulgarity/money connection.
CU is allowing this buying of our country to the extremely wealthy that think they owe noting to their success and think workers are just a cost item on their accounting sheets.
We are fighting the historical worship of mammon ($$$$$$) vs. the protections for the least of thee.
I don't understand the lame brain emails -- totally unresponsive to the interested voter, much less the activist with repetitious wording and content completely oblivious to current happenings in their dependence on panic or outrage. Frustrating that these efforts and resources are spent this way.
Especially since republican over-the-top insanity scripts better messages than any pundit could come up with. Yet, it's the same old crap. Joe gets some zingers in but he is ignored because he's not on trial, I suppose. Who knew...
Makes me wonder if the 'journalists' covering the news for reporting to the citizens don't realize that's what they're supposed to be doing -- that they are essential to a democratic republic, indeed, to any knowledgeable citizenry. They don't seem to understand the basic structural morality of this system of governance. Instead, they seem to be marketing a really bad movie series forged from TV shows like Dallas and Gunsmoke and As The World Turns.
They follow the money, Elon claims to promote free speech, but he spews bull schitt more than anybody. Years ago I watched ATWT, it made more sense than the world I live in today.
Sorry Frank.., but (I fear), it has a phony ring to it. Seniors comprise a ton of people who are deadset in their distaste for LGBTQ; lack of border control; affirmative action policies; run-away inflation & energy costs; to name a few. Forget the fact that they (we..) are the recipients of so many benefits, every day. They're minds are made up, and Joe isn't the answer. The vitriol out of FauxNews is all they hear. So good luck to the best intentions of the "brilliant Harvard students", I hope they're prepared for the visceral gnorance-factor they will encounter.
I hope you have not forgotten those of us Octos who marched in the mid to later 20C.....Civil Rights, Viet Nam, Women's Rights, No Nukes, Same Sex Marriage....We are still here!
Thank you Susan for noticing my comment. I'm only headed toward toward 81, so I'm new on this "octo" field. Trouble, there are fewer and fewer of us, but that doesn't mean we're not on board with what the heck is going on. However, there are a pile of folks that look older than we but aren't! And, those are the the bozos I'm largely referring to. Their minds are made up with the facts.. "the facts" so convincingly presented to them. They have absolutely no use for what LFA tries to present, or anyone else. We're surrounded by them - and they're mostly white, or 'think' they are... and that's good enuf for em! Ughhh.
Honestly?? You're talking about the Woodstock generation, right?? The first huge group to openly accept and enfold gay people?? I hitch-hiked to San Francisco in tie-dye with flowers in my hair, and I will never, ever be one of those fictional "seniors" you describe. You are always on dangerous ground when you try to speak for such an enormous "group". Perhaps you need to more clearly define who you are referring to.
Linda.. you're right.! and.., hohohoo,, the "fictional" bunch, as you put it, are mostly dead or suffering from dimentia (sp). I'm sure part of that group, but not quite dead (yet). I must Thank you for being kind to me in your comment. Todays "seniors" are indeed the 60's generation . I guess what we're stuck with ("we" being you as well as "I") are the offspring of folks who have harbored ill-gotten prejudices from their peers, parents, or politicians. And, most of those "folks" are white, hahahaaa, or THINK of themselves as such (nobody is pure-white!). I guess those are the 'humans' I'm referring to. Sorry I was off base in my own little rant. I'll try to do better.
Ira, unfortunately, November 5, 2024, is not the drop dead date - and let’s hope that it is not “literally speaking” because I still remember how horrendous it felt on the morning of November 9, 2016, when we learned that Hillary had lost. We will be fighting to right our ship for several general elections to come after 2024, even if Biden wins again, based upon the fuel that trump added to the burning embers and the fire that he ignited and that continues to burn in America. We need to have a smart, vigorous and youthful democratic presidential administration - male and/or female at the helm, plus a supermajority in both Houses of Congress along with beginning to put democrats [back] in control of a majority of our states’ governmental bodies!!!
Every day my comments are "Vote Blue to save our democracy" and one individual has been constantly berating me saying we don't have a democracy, we are a Constitutional Republic as stated in the Constitution.
Harvard..., really? Now that certainly is a liberally funded institution. Isn't it. Being curious and admittedly sceptical (my nature), I googled and found this: "Harvard has the highest retention rate of any college in the USA, 98%. And that is defined by the government as completion of the program that the student began within 150% of the time normally required, so 98% of students complete their program within 6 years". Well, doggone it.., good for them. All that says to moi is that all those 'lucky' (mostly privileged, I would surmise) kids, those 'pre-qualified kids' walked out of there with a piece of paper they paid dearly for. Notably, 51.8% were Fe-male. Simple-males' bungled their way to 48.2%..? My point being, why are 51.8% allowing themselves to be subjected to this hocus-pocus healthcare environment, dick-tated to them? Huh? Go ahead.., help me understand will ya.
If your question at the end of your comment here is rhetorical, then you don't need any help understanding. If it isn't, consider that the deck is stacked against women from day one, in a variety of ways.
OK Ally, I guess that's what I, along with the rest of the "male" population need help in. Because, coming out of the womb, I don't think we are instinctively prejudiced. Seems in this progressive-world, the education system in the USA has lost its compass and "mothers" are dealing more and more with a warped conception of 'common sense' principles.
Yes! That last paragraph was a superb wrap-up!! On one hand trump, one of the most depraved men of human history, has been the source of my hand-winging, but on the other, my daily prayer of his demise is proving very powerful....
Unfortunately, Sophia, I don't see Trump as one of the most depraved men, but only a member of the worst class of humans that acts only selfishly. This class is vast, likely a majority of humanity, that is best kept in check by a democratic system of government. That is why this putrid class of humans rails against the checks on power inherent in democracy. (And that is why I can't vote for any Republican candidate until MAGA is suppressed and diminished again.)
Paul Ryan's statement that he will not be voting for trump is the core of my opinion. Ryan has been very outspoken as an Ayn Rand disciple. The rest is rumor and conjecture.
I am not religious but pray to the powers that be in the Universe. I bet there is a few million of us praying for the same. If the wish is granted and I die the same day, I will die VERY HAPPY!!
You don't have to be religious to communicate with Divine Intelligence. Dr. Larry Dossey has enacted studies proving prayer works. Actually, Divine Intelligence, as I write in my book, The Divine Language of Coincidence, brings about what we need even if we don't pray. It's happened throughout my life. Now scientists are interested in my book and coincidence (look up the Scientific and Medical Network). They're catching up!
It just occurred to me that when "fighting for democracy" felt like just another thing on a very long "to do" list, I was very resistant. But what it has offered to me is a powerful sense of belonging to a community of fellow citizens who care as much as I do or more about not letting Trump and his ultra-right wing puppeteers (in the background since the 70's) take over my country! So here's another community of post-card writing, phone banking, candidate supporting, ignorance fighting citizens - my home grassroots group, markersfordemocracy.org. Check us out!
Yes, Exactly. His extremism ignited awareness of what's at stake and action to prevent it The problems have been brewing as you say, .it was here before, but easy to miss when the other side seemed civil.
Defeating DJT in November is paramount, but we must not overlook how we got here. Independents broke for Obama (hope and change) then switched to Trump (drain the swamp), and back to Biden in 2020. While most voters want our government to govern in a truly representative fashion, many don't understand that, over time, our government has been designed to operate as it does now. That's why my "fight" is spreading the gospel of Gehl.
“You have a choice to make. You can continue applying your agency elsewhere, indirectly perpetuating the political-industrial complex that undermines the very causes you are prioritizing separately (and nobly, to be sure). Or you can redirect your agency to further catalyze a twenty-first-century wave of political innovation to break partisan gridlock and save our democracy; in which case you’re advancing every cause. Without a sea change, our political system will continue to do more harm to education, the environment, the economy—you name it. A transformation of the politics industry can do more than we can do on our own to help those sacred corners of America.”
Gehl, Katherine M.. The Politics Industry (p. 172). Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
There are 3 links in my profile containing more information.
So agree Pj Jough-Hana. The entire letter was spectacular but the last paragraph pulled it all together with truthful simplicity. He must be defeated in November.
The cowboy myth, almost by definition, involves lots of fiction.
As Heather mentions Stormy in connection with today's ongoing fictions, let's appreciate further how Stormy spoke to fiction, when she testified how the sex was real, in contrast to the scripted.
If she were doing the scripting (as she has done for cameras professionally for years), she emphasized how she’d have done a much better job on that.
So, too, in the larger America, the effing has been real as the billionaire classes offshored the millions of jobs, indebted students in “higher” ed, stacked the judiciary with the right-wing corrupted, turned social media to divisiveness, and rid all the schools of any effective humanities.
Thus the scripts for all have sunk to the low qualities as Stormy said she’d have improved.
Americans know Trump’s a sham, a bragging pussy-grabber, racketeer, rapist, racist, and ally to the world’s cruelest dictators and murderers.
But he entertains with fantastic hyperbole, stinging epithets, adjectives glorying insults, bing-bing-boing-bong sound effects to accompany his scripts, and hand gestures constantly jerking off accomplices on both sides of him. Straight from vaudeville, he’s the only person in America still in touch with the public’s hunger for stories, narrative, character (assassination), and all the other aspects of scripting Stormy would do better.
We’re effed, as was she by reality, by an old man who invited young woman to dinner only to be given something quite other than dinner.
What educated our elites all totally unequipped with any humanities any better than those of the fat, orange-encrusted made-up con guy?
Phil, I don’t disagree with your general statement of opinion in your comment. What continues to amaze me is the millions of our fellow Americans who can be so easily duped, manipulated, and roused to anger by a charlatan. I’ve always believed in America but that belief system has been stressed ever since 2016. I trust that reality will prevail over emotion by the time of the election.
They aren’t duped. They know what they’re voting for: the Republican promise to preserve systemic white advantages. On this, Republicans have delivered and will continue to deliver. White voters aren’t duped, but they are delusional. The systemic advantages Republicans deliver won’t help working-class white people because they have no power over the Republican oligarchs that will make the rules. Systemic white advantages will remain in place but will fail to do working-class white people any good.
In 2021, I was thinking of running for the school board in our small rural district in ME. My incentive to run was the rumors that two of the people running for the board were white Christian nationalists that wanted to ban books from the library and alter the curriculum to align with their Christian principles including daily prayers.
Two of the current board members had not decided whether to continue and these two were the only ones running. I filled out the paperwork and when I went to turn them in, the two current members had filed their papers. The challengers were soundly defeated by the incumbents.
While researching for the role, I looked at the test scores of the students on the standardized tests. One couldn't help noticing the girls outscored the boys in every category and every age group. I also checked out the scores in surrounding districts and the test score patterns were similar.
I talked with the school principal and asked her why she thought this was happening. She said that for the boys, it wasn't cool to be smart and that basically they were lazy. She told me about how she tried to motivate them in various ways and continues to do so.
Is this an example of the white privilege cowboy mentality? It sure looks like it. Our community voted for Biden but it was very close to 50/50. The only way I see this changing is if the cowboy mentality is exposed as being fraudulent.
Thanks Heather for exposing the Republicans and their conspiracy myths. They will stop at nothing.
As for the prototype Marlboro Man actor, he died of lung cancer. Too bad he didn't regard the government studies and warnings. And Trump's populist keep-everything-open and go-without-masks attitude resulted in a million American deaths from Covid, the highest per capita of industrialized nations. What a blight this man is on Americans. He's beyond criminal; he's a horror story.
Gary, nothing worse for a high school guy than to be seen as a nerd. Certain to be bullied among other things. Then there is sports which in my thinking, often gets in the way of first rate education, partly because of the hiring of coaches for teaching positions. The myth is that sports build character, teamwork, and other assorted bs. I invite purveyors of that myth to take a good look at college athletics which is now nothing but bribes, egos, money, and the ability to leave a team in the transfer portal.
Michelle, i would like to disabuse you of your notion of high school athletics. It can be easy to fall into the stereotypes of redneck football coaches that force prayer on the 50 yardline. That is small part of the reality. High school athletics (soccer and Alpine ski racing) have helped define my daughters as more than pretty and smart. Through sport they have built physical strength, teamwork, and most importantly inner power and self esteem that will propel them forward in the world. They have learned physical discipline that will give them a leg up in health and longevity. They often kick the boys ass in ski racing! You need only look at college basketball, soccer and world cup alpine ski racing to see that American women have taken center stage and are the foremost household names BEFORE men in these disciplines. And my girls are at the top of their class in academics as well! It is not a myth...
Nothing will disabuse me of my opinion of athletics as I outlined it. Please do not accuse me of stereotyping because I worked with a good number of people who were coaches and coached girls' basketball myself. I love what your daughters have achieved and I am not absolutely against sports, but they caused no small amount of problems in our small school. I was the first to coach girls' basketball and it would take me quite a while to tell all the awful things I and the kids endured. We had some awful teachers because they were hired to coach and i am not saying the some of the other teachers who coached were bad. The booster club at our school hired the head football coach and they picked some pieces of work including one who lied on his resume. I could go on with this as well. We were season ticket holders our the U of Oregon women's basketball team for years. We have had to stop partly because of the drive is too much for us at our age and partly because we are dismayed by the state of the main college sports which have become all about bribery and leaving if players do not get the playing time they deserve. And of course television revenue. I am sure there are other reasons, but NIL and the transfer portal has wrecked havoc. One Oregon State player who said he was staying and then left whined about not getting the house he was promised. When we have a housing problem like we have, that one really stuck in my craw. We still bought our tickets and sold them to friends, but even they turned those good seats down this year....they have a longer drive than we do. As for grades, generally females do better than males.
I applaud Biden's push for recognition of teachers. They are under attack, in my opinion, because they are great role models and influencers of students.
That being said, there does seem to be an attitude of some students that it is not cool to be educated.
I HIGHLY recommend that the Letter's "bookclub" read Andy Borowitz's "Profiles in Ignorance". It is astounding.
But Gary, isn’t RFKJR our best hope to finish the job his dad and uncle started?Everone can see how feeble President Biden is becoming.If he was capable of beating Trump the DNC wouldn’t be so focused on smearing RFKJR.
I can’t vote for President Biden because he hasn’t broken the corporate control over our government and because the DNC imposed unfair rules in the nominational primaries that weren’t democratic
John, what will it take for you to grasp that "not voting for Biden" or "voting for RFK, Jr" - IS A VOTE OF SUPPORT FOR TRUMP AND THE end of DEMOCRACY? It is obvious. It is a fact. Do you not see the greater danger in a win by the GQP? A win for the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025? A win for more judges bred by the Federalist Society operated by the oligarchs who are dedicated to the furthering the Feudalism that Democrats are fighting?
Your protest vote for the guy who thinks cell phones give us "leaky brains" and "vaccines cause autism" would confirm only your gullibility and a life of fantasy. A person can be well intentioned and still aid in the destruction of a nation and its way of life.
If you don't vote for Joe, you are aiding abetting the greatest threat to our nation since Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.
Or...you really do like Donald Trump and the judges he installed who removed the right of women to determine when to have a child?
The choice is binary. Biden, democracy and decency or a further descent in Hell for women . Biden or concentration camps. Biden or the destruction of Federal regulations that protect our water, air and the health of future generations. If don't vote for Biden you are literally damning our children to illness and early death.
Read Project 2025. Then Decide. If after that you still won't vote for saving our world, perhaps cell phones do cause something...
Bill you are freaking out. My vote for RFKJR is not a vote for Trump. I believe he is well on his way to getting on the ballots in all 50 states. I believe that if he does get on all the ballots he will be poised to win. If he doesn’t get on the ballots I will concede. We are at a unique point in history. Both major party candidates are disliked by many. Independent voters now outnumber others.I believe RFKJR is meant to carry on the vision his dad and uncle had for our country.He believes it too, and he paid attention to how they led our country so he can do the same.I remember when JFK was shot.I believe Allen Dules was behind JFK ‘s death. I want to give Bobby the chance to do what his dad and uncle did.
oh please. RFK Jr. is another narcissist. And really, truly, worm-brained.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – In the latest setback for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid, a worm who dined in the candidate’s brain wrote a brutal Yelp review shortly before dying, the reviewing site confirmed on Monday.
The worm’s review began on a discouraging note, claiming that Kennedy’s brain was “almost impossible to find.”
“Once I managed to get there, I couldn’t believe how cramped it was,” the worm continued. “I’m all for intimate dining but this place was ridiculously tiny.”
The worm also slammed the noise level in the candidate’s brain, complaining, “I couldn’t hear myself think with all the different voices in there.”
With one star, Kennedy’s brain ranks last in Yelp’s “Worm Dining” category, tied with Kristi Noem’s brain."
I don't agree. RFK Jr. will install an entire new cabinet and with his wacky ideas about abortion and vaccinations, do you really trust him to surround himself with what currently is probably the best cabinet of our lifetimes.
I don't like the word everyone when describing Biden's health. I am only unhappy with a few decisions he has made and his values match mine to a tee. I just saw a survey that said that 38% of voters feel his health is not an issue to be concerned about.
Thank you for being respectful. I think many democrats are supporting President Biden in spite of his age because they really want Harris. She demonstrated her communication skills in the Bret Kavanaugh hearings. She gaslighted him to tears.She isn’t for me.
John, I highly suggest that you sign up for both the daily email "What Did Biden Do Today?" and check the official White House website under the tab "results". It is truly sad that the mainstream media does not report on all his achievements, but satin pj's or brain worms is a much more interesting story to the National Enquirer mindset mentality.
Slinging the "feeble" label at Biden with no supportive data is merely expressing your opinion. Perhaps you might populate your empty substack with more informative posts.
For every trumper I encounter, their education comes from Fox U. They ARE duped, too. Until we can close down the Fox hate machine, democracy is dying.
MaryPat, I agree that Trump followers' beliefs are validated by FOX, Bannon, and others that portray Trump as a victim and Biden as evil.
There's one word thar Professor Richardson used today, which I think sums up everything that Trump is and tries to do. CONVOLUTED.
We've all expressed our opinions, our outrage at what Donald Trump has done to destroy our democracy. We've expressed our disbelief that so many people have fallen under his spell and support him because he validates their feelings of racism, entitlement, exclusion, and their fear that their way of life will be threatened by President Biden. Funny thing is, Biden has done more for average Americans than Trump has ever thought about doing. Now that's certainly convoluted.
So, with our astonishment being known, i so appreciate all the suggestions of what we can do to remove Trump from power and to reelect President Biden.
Rex, no they aren't although I do wonder about some women who seem to think this guy is sent by God. Also some people do love the class clown because then nothing gets done and they can have a good laugh at the expense of the students who want to learn and authority.
Sadder reality, Gary -- that millions of Americans have no education in any humanities.
It's not just one charlatan. It's all the schools void of humanities, so many elites so unable to model any uses of our many great novelists, memoirists, historians, composers, playwrights, screenwriters, photographers, film makers.
We need them, Gary.
Remember how William Carlos Williams wrote in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":
"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."
Remember how in "Night Mail," when Auden wrote "Men long for news," he meant letters, first, but also the more humane news from our best in all our arts?
The fraction of Americans who have no education in any humanities was always miniscule and never had a significant effect on elections. What does affect US elections is white fear of losing their dominance. White dominance was nearly absolute until the mid-1960s. Then, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act scared the bejesus out of white voters, and they flocked to the party that, with the emergence if the Nixon-Atwater Southern Strategy, promised to deliver white Americans from demographic threats.
But equally true what happened a hundred years earlier, when the Know-Nothings agitated hatred against the German protestants and the Irish Catholics then immigrating into the U.S.
They were all white men, women, and children, Rex, but the English whites hated them, hated cities, hated industrial works, hated to be taxed for federal help in transportation infrastructure, in education, in health clinics and hospitals.
Lincoln persisted. Perhaps his greatest achievement -- in 1862 signing the Justin Morrill land grant legislation which gave America the world's greatest public universities, which in turn welcomed all the other ethnicities that came to the U.S. after the Civil War, and well into the 20th century.
Yep, and Obama propelled the Republicans into the Tea Party and later Freedom Caucus. Social conscience doesnt play well in large segments of white America, and perhaps elsewhere as well.
This comment from Phil is too esoteric for me at 6:00 am. Poetry and novelists are not the first things I think of when I consider the humanities. Kids hate the various literature classes required in high school for the very examples you provided. One has to have an excellent teacher to help students find the value, meaning, and appreciation for such.
Christine, I find myself in complete agreement with you. I consider myself fairly well read, but my perusal of and enjoyment of the great "literature" has eluded me my entire life (which I am certain bothered my mother, the poet and English lit lover). My interests tended towards the more biographical/autobiographical paths; to illustrate this, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of my all-time favorite novels, while prose and poetry do not interest me at all, and "searching for the meaning" in something that is well written but (to my mind) so "out there" that I have to search beyond the words for the meaning holds no interest at all.
My "humanities" courses came in the form of History classes, the study within sociology and psychology, some philosophy, and the like. I joke (sort of) that the reason I majored in Criminology at college was it took the parts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy that I was interested in and created a field of study for me. I am glad that while it didn't prepare me for the nuts and bolts of how to be a cop, it did prepare me for recognizing the evil and good that mankind does, and its impact on behavior and conduct.
I am not a novel reader - read about 7 in the past 70 years. I am a bit of a writer and do READ stuff relevant to things I want to write about. I never went to college, but did my wife's college humanities work while she was becoming an RN. Did a lot of research reading for that in 1986 (No WWW - just Books, Magazines & Microfisch at the library) and actually got good grades for her. Especially the long treatise on "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," in which "she" referenced her husband's account of Afghanistan 4 years earlier in 1975. :)
Ppl have actually chastised me for not enjoying reading novels as they do - and being rebellious I raise my fist and shout Don't Tell Me How to Enjoy!
My thing is movies and have written over 500 reviews posted on the 'Net. However, I have recently read a 1909 novel, "The Island of Regeneration" and wrote a book report related to it and its 1915 silent movie. All of this started after watching the 1980 movie "The Blue Lagoon" and discovering it was from a 1908 novel, of the same title by Irish author H. De Vere Stacpoole, which I am currently reading. I have started getting into the daily reading, and sometimes read extra chapters just because it is interesting. I even sense a connection to the world of 115 years past by what I am reading. I just hope this Novel Reading Habit of late is not addictive.
Kids "hate" the literature classes because no one has taught them how to read, and social media reinforces the idea that reading is obsolete. Humanities teachers make a difference when they are allowed to teach.
I just checked "Night Mail" you referenced fro W.H. Auden. I am of that last generation that dealt in mail written on paper, having put my Uncle Bill's WWII letters written to my grandmother in the Library of Congress' Veteran History Project archives. Then there are the letters written to me by my first GF in Turkiye where I was stationed in the Air Force in 1964. Still have them six decades later.
"Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong."
I never heard of Auden until 1970, while reading an obscure poem by him in the short lived Ralph Ginzberg "Avant Garde" magazine titled "A Day for a Lay," which emboldened my budding homosexual yearnings. My continuing education in the Humanities. :)
You were obviously never in the military. I was, and I was never around so many white male morons in one place at one time anywhere else in all my life. Yes, there are good people, great people, one meets in the military, but the population of morons/cannon fodder is overhwelming.
Of course. The rigor of military training to is make those ks more efficient. Mind you, while i don't promote sanctioned violence, I'm not a pacifist. And, I'm more than glad German and Japanese imperial ambitions failed in spades
I believe it is true that anger is a very effective method of combating depression, and I bet there are a lot of people out there who would be depressed because they did not get what they wanted. Anger helps them believe that following Voldemort, he who must not be elected, they will become strong, rich, and fertile, and powerful. The idea that this is a mirage cannot be admitted to their thought pattern, for they will again become depressed, and feel worthless.
Frank, intuitively, I would have written what you wrote about depression-anger-GOP, until I saw a reputable study that right wingers are generally happier than left wingers. See link below.
BUT one psychodynamic explanation is that according to Fromm, thoe with authoritarian streaks are sadomasochists, so they ar enot miserable but happily 'getting off' on their pathology?
"All of the people who support an authoritarian power structure are equally authoritarian as well. Someone who uses this strategy reconnects themselves to the world through what Fromm calls a type of sadomasochism. Two words there—sadism and masochism: sadism being the desire to control others, to dominate exploit or steal from others; masochism being the desire to submit to some power and be controlled or dominated. The authoritarian is sadistic in the sense that they want to support an authoritarian setup so that other people and groups will be controlled. But they are masochistic in the sense that they themselves want to submit to that authority as part of the process." Link at bottom.
Reality has been hijacked by propaganda, MSM is stirring from a deep coma. Fellow Americans in a trance, all by design. Don’t trust or hope, kick arse.
My belief in America (I hate that name, as America is North+Central+South America), has been tested since 2001, our response to 9/11. Clearly after 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld were allowed to run amok. And USians (my word for US residents) embraced this lie!
Sorry, if I were older, I'd obviously add in the Vietnam War, but I was only born in 1974.
You could add in quite a bit more, even since you were born! The invasion of Iraq on trumped up charges just for one thing, which soon gave rise to ISIS, then Afghanistan, a failed cultural makeover.
I think it is magical thinking to think Trump voters are ignorant dupes. Trump delivered for the populists and the plutocrats - the Supreme Court to overturn Roe and tax breaks for the wealthy. And all those 'dupes' were smart enough to know that voting is a united effort to take power.
Unlike the doctors Stein and West - who really dupe their followers.
lin•, I think that to put the MAGAts as "ignorant dupes" is indeed "magical thinking". Perhaps some of the more...searching for word... patently "out there" representations are, perhaps, ignorant dupes (thinking of the lady wearing adult diapers and sporting a sign that said "real men wear diapers", or some of the ones that Jordan Klepper (I think) interviews.) Many of the ones that I know are not ignorant dupes, but conservative, Christian, heteronormative, and of a patriarchal mindset who do not like seeing BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people getting their "special rights" which are in reality those rights that they have themselves. They feed on the "conservative" "news" channels and accept their propaganda as fact.
A racist (even a closet racist); a Scrooge; those whose lack of drive, courage or belief in themselves gave birth to an irrational envy and selfishness so deeply rooted that logic cannot disturb its carapace — this too common combination of human disturbance is pervasive in our society, and their feelings are kindling to the GOP.
Feelings usually trump reason and the GOP preys upon these various, defensive groups — inveterate racists; gun owners; those who pervert their religious beliefs to relegate science and medicine to a dark, suspicious magic; the thoughtlessly literal-minded who accept simple-sounding illogical deductions as reasonable, provided its conclusions agree with their unexamined feelings; those who express a dominant facade despite their personal failures, who necessarily lie to themselves; those whose sexuality is threatened merely by observing its variety; and those threatened by the human variety of life, thought and experience found in inanimate books and art, who seek to portray them as weaponized against their creed and self-determination.
These, all, the GOP seeks as though for truffles in a forest and stirs them into a powerful broth; for power is the goal — at any cost; democracy irrelevant.
Thank you for reading. It's a bit long, but after reading Letters From an American and Civil Discourse, I can't lead my day until I empty the my mind.of the invading response. I feel compulsive until I consider the times.
In the history book These Truths, by Jill Lepore, are the following paragraphs about the first, highly successful political campaign managers, Campaigns, Inc., aka The Lie Factory, founded in 1933. They never lost a campaign. Republicans have mastered their campaign strategy rules:
'Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming is good. Never explain anything. "The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support." Say the same thing over and over again. "We assume we have to get a voter's attention 7 times to make a sale". Subtlety is your enemy. "Words that lean on your mind are no good. They must dent it." Simplify, simplify, simplify. "A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. And Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think."
Make it personal. Candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn't have an opponent, invent one. Pretend that you are the voice of the people. You can't wage a defensive campaign and win. Never shy from controversy; instead win the controversy. "The average American doesn't want to be educated, he doesn't want to improve his mind; he doesn't want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are 2 ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only 2 that we have ever found successful." You can put on a fight ("He likes a good battle with no punches pulled"), or you can put on a show ("He likes the movies, he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades). "So, if you can't fight, PUT ON A SHOW! If you put on a good show, Mr. And Mrs. America will turn out to see it.'
Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were the husband-and-wife team that started Campaigns, Inc., the first full-time political consulting firm in the United States to manage a candidate's overall strategy, from messaging to financials. They exploited mass media and applied marketing techniques to politics, mostly for Republican Party candidates and conservative California issues. A rare loss was supporting Willkie against Roosevelt's 3rd term during WW2. A blemished win was supporting Japanese internment camps and the removal of Japanese from all of California. An enduring win still existing today is their media campaign starting in 1948 at the behest of the AMA to scuttle all attempts to create a national health insurance plan like that of most other advanced countries. (The first attempt was unfortunately called Compulsory Health Insurance, which gave Whitaker an easy way to equate it with Socialism.) For a $100,000 per year retainer and a $5 million nationwide ad budget, Campaigns Inc successfully turned a "sensible, popular, and urgently needed healthcare reform into a [political, socialist] boogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of people are still scared of it." ("The Lie Factory: How Politics Became a Business" by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker , Sept. 24, 2012
For a detailed article and photos of original documentation, see
By talking more about actual issues of governance by cooperation and compromise, Democrats simply don't appeal to the emotions that make for a thrilling fight or show.
But Trump has followed every rule: he both "fights" his imaginary foes and puts on a show via his rallies etc. His followers vote for his entertainment even while they are measurably the least educated and least informed parts of the populace.
The article and photos of the documentation were riveting. Thanks for the link. I’m not done yet and will return to it later. The comment threads to the HCR letters, routinely expose me to new information on historical events. Yours certainly fit that category.
Thank Jill Lepore. She wrote most of this comment in a way that makes history live in the Now, and she did the historical analysis. The through-line is just remarkable. I've saved her analysis and posted it multiple times since I first read it years ago. It remains germane to every election cycle.
I'd like to think that the American public has changed, and I do find hope that voting percentages have indeed risen, though it sometimes feels like it has risen only for the show or the fight and not for our civic duties.
Many public schools are not teaching civics or critical thinking. The Texas Republican Party platform in 2012 specifically stated “ We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs.”
I have friends who voted and even actively campaigned for him. One has a PhD in psychology the other an advanced degree in electrical engineering. Both kind compassionate guys. It baffles me that they can support this petty, mean, vulgar, lazy person who honestly is not witty or deep.
MM began in the glorious 50s, and much of what the Republicans stands for has been metastacing for several decades now. Trump didn't invent the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus, but he's definitely a delusional demagogic genius.
Inkling as to what it means to give up democracy. If, please not, they get to find out, it will be too late. My son is 52. When he was in elementary school he once surprised me by saying: "Mommy: some people are too stupid to live." It became his motto.
Most particularly the too-rich, under-socialized computer geeks of Silly Con Valley. All the "Democrats" among them of previous years now ready to make Trump president so they can continue their "fratboy-bro" culture. Elmo Muck, whose father moved the family from Canada to South Africa after apartheid was created because he couldn't stand all the liberal ease of life in Canada. Muck needs to be brought down all the way, followed by Peter Thiel and the semi-socialized Mark Andreesen.
So many, there are so many of the rich vulgar, TCinLA.
They so want to lobotomize American education, to turn all humanity into repetitive units -- preferably most ill-paid units, gnomes and serfs all interchangeable with each other. All standardized-tested-to-death (and machine gradable).
This has been one of the most depressing factors in the societal shift that will challenge our democracy at its roots. I used to have a modicum of admiration for the computer geeks.
No one kept stats in those days. But I recall anecdotal info putting black Americans at not quite one third of the "cowboys" (boys and men working dangerous, menial ranch jobs).
The Mexican contingent was more than a third. Leaving whites not quite our 1950s beloved Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Lone Ranger, Have Gun Will Travel Paladin.
Glad you got the message, which I posted 3 times in all because the first two responses to your message never came up on my screen, so I published it as a main comment.
I'm trying hard now to picture a very large orange-faced cowboy singing “Git along little dogies / It's your misfortune / Ain’t none o’ my own” to his human dogies...
But all I get is the White Knight falling off his horse every which way… And then his ballad…
*
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth,
But chiefly for the wish that he
Might drink my noble health.
*
Yes, another real product of Looking Glass Land…
‘Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?’ Alice enquired.
‘Not yet,’ said the Knight. ‘But I've got a plan for keeping it from falling off.’
The "original" cowboys were vaqueros of Mexican, Indigenous, Mulatto, and African ancestry. Horses were reintroduced to the Americas in the 1500s by the Spanish as well as their traditions of herding cattle. Not much White about it.
"Give 'em a fight or give 'em a show. If you give 'em a good show, Mr. And Mrs. America will turn out and vote for it.' -- Campaigns, Inc. The first and highly successful campaign marketing firm. Trump followed all their rules. (Source : 'These Truths' by Jill Lepore)
The onslaught daily leaves one astounded and wondering how to filter truth from fiction. I’ll admit my bias in that I no longer see any statement from the right with anything but doubt and derision. I’ve become that person who has decidedly taken a left turn in politics and become intolerant of the right, almost in any form. In any public conversation, I can temper myself. But privately, I’m seething.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, in part because every criminal defendant has so many rights in this country, founded on the rule of law. But they do turn. Judge Merchan is trying very hard to avoid reversible error that could help an appeal succeed. And the Orange T*%d cannot pardon himself for a state conviction even if he wins in November. He WILL be held accountable some day, even if his extortion/bribery scheme with the fossil fuel industry succeeds and he gets a cool billion to support his interminable court battles. Have faith. And yes, get up tomorrow and keep fighting. We have to.
How did the Republicans get so far down into this sewer? I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. There were things that would simply disqualify a candidate from running. Not thinking of ideology but of optics. I remember Howard Dean losing the nomination on the optics of a scream that didn't really happen. Or Gary Hart dropping out after the photo of him with a woman not his wife on a boat.
Even the Bush/Cheney campaign colored within the lines. Their politics were wretched, but if Bush 2 had bragged about shooting someone on 5th Avenue, or grabbing them by the pussy, or made fun of a developmentally disabled person, he never would have been nominated, much less "elected".
The entire Trump phenomenon is an aberration. Why was he not forced out by the party mechanism before this nightmare even began?
I have a plan for November whether he is able to cheat his way in again or not. He is physically and mentally weak. Nature will take its course, and maybe before the election. But the damage he has done will outlive him and take a generation or two to repair.
I don’t think the GOP ever got over Barack Obama being elected POTUS in 2008. McConnell vowed to make Obama a one term president, which didn’t go as planned, much to his dismay ( is doing good things for the country such a bad thing?). Mitch had his moments in the sun, but look what that energy eventually unleashed: a major political party so hungry for power, so intent on idolatry, so dysfunctional they are now eating their own, and endorsing a madman as their favored candidate.
,...and The Heritage Foundation and other right wing organizations, using various Christian organizations to push their agenda steadily for years.....painting themselves as "the good guys" when all along they were working to control and lead the Christian Right for the benefit of their far right agenda.
The 'dark side" has been pretending to be the "good guys"...now we are all experiencing the results of their hard , focused work to gain votes to succeed in pushing their agenda.
Agreed, i have subscribed "subversively" to THF, I can only shake my head when i scan it. Atavistic USA, all this nested inside the world's Superpower.
The Bush/Cheney mess was a step in this direction. I thought it was as low as repubs would go. Silly me. A half-black President, was just what the cretins needed to stir the pot and muddy the waters. And the vile, witches brew is what we got. We assumed that they still had a modicum of humanity. Well, they don’t…
Lee Atwater's admissions of his role in torpedoing Gary Hart, undid much of the trust I still had in my old party (basically tipped back towards the party when they forced Nixon to resign). It is hard to sort the real details of what went was going on as Hart and his wife were supposedly separated at the time, but what later set me against my old party was some of the senior players and fund raisers that bragged about how they had done it. The final straw, after a period of waiting to see if they would reject the disgusting Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz GoPac memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," was a well placed fund raiser asking/inviting a few of us to "fight dirtier than Democrats" (at a time when convictions of my old party's players seemed about 6 times that of the Democrats).
I left the old party the same year Elizabeth Warren did, for pretty much for similar reasons though mine included revelations from people I could never consider becoming as underhanded as. It's one thing to hear accusations from the opposition, but to basically get confirmation from within the ranks, as Cassidy Hutchinson is my heroic example of at a key place and time, clarifies the moral decisions that are so much easier to live with.
And I do believe bribery is a felony on both sides of the transaction…some of those oil execs might find it difficult to hold the public in thrall if they were the ones charged.
Companies need to be named!!! Let the citizens of this country see and MAYBE understand why the prices at the pump are artificially high. It is the same reason prices at the grocery store are artificially inflated. Thanks to the wheeling and dealing and false promises made by a Life long con man.
Those execs should only be charged with bribery if they made a contribution to Trump as a direct result of that fundraiser. I suspect most will avoid Trump like the plague because he's bad for business. They might prefer the policies his controllers trick him to parrot, but they also need a stable society for their businesses to thrive. When society starts to fail, so does the oil business because demand for petroleum products drops.
The number of crimes TFG has committed in plain sight is staggering and our system of law, which he disdains, along with his ill gotten billions, continue to protect him from consequences as he runs out the clock.
It is not just him. The republicans who knowingly and willfully say nothing or worse support his depravity are the real problem. Watching literally hundreds of members of Congress pander to a lunatic and deny their oaths of office is what no founder could have anticipated. We must recognize them and never vote for any of them. Many have said the truth and then waffle back to defending his nonsense . They are not patriots and in my view should be prosecuted. It would not hurt for the media to insist on an answer to what evidence there is to continue to suggest anything be a free and fair election.
I applaud your use of Stephanie Clifford's given name. A Daily Show comedian made the comment about how inappropriate it is to use her stage name repeatedly in the news. It labels her by her profession. The main stream media continues to call her Stormy Daniels and the trial, the hush money trial. She is Stephanie Clifford and the trial is related to election interference.
Agree, but interestingly when first sworn in to testify last week and asked which name she preferred to have used in the trial, she said Stormy Daniels.
My opinion was that Stephanie was "acting as Stormy in her chosen professional role with DT".
I find nothing comical about her or her profession. She is honest as a human being in her chosen profession. In my opinion, there is no more to be said.
Ellie, no small part of what makes her, Stormy or Stephanie, so admirable is the self-confidence with which she says her truth. She is a woman who KNOWS she's good and what she's good at and takes pride in how she does what she's good at.
The cowboy (in myths) was to protect the good guys from the bad guys. Imagine Sheriff Wyatt Earp telling the townspeople that he was going to open the safe for the bank robbers if they made sure that he was reelected sheriff—he’d have been run out of town. This quid pro quo is precisely what 45 attempted to do with Ukraine—and he’s promised to hold up funding passed by Congress if he chooses.
Biden has made sure that all states are treated equally regardless of whether their citizens voted for him; don’t expect that if 45 gets reelected.
EGDx2, I'm working from memory of the WAPO article but, the piece included a number of Oil CEO's including but, not limited to Dan Eberhart, Oil Billionaire, Harold Hamm, &Jack Fusco CEO of Cheniere Energy of the now important LNG industry.
The article caught my eye because of the involvement of Republican, North Dakota Governor, DOUG BURGUM who has Oil Donor corrections & is mentioned as a potential VP Candidate given the South Dakota Governor's escalating debacle.
Hey, Bryan and EGDx2: Here is a quote from the article I believe you are thinking of, Bryan.
"The roughly two dozen executives invited included Mike Sabel, the CEO and founder of Venture Global, and Jack Fusco, the CEO of Cheniere Energy, whose proposed projects would directly benefit from lifting the pause on new LNG exports. Other attendees came from companies including Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, according to an attendance list obtained by The Post."
Rachel Maddow's book, "Blowout" has a nice history of the fossil fuel industry in the US. She goes into quite a bit of detail on Harold Hamm and what a scumbag he is. Trump met with him several times when he was President.
So many scumbag oilmen, like cowboys with lots of money.
They have figured out how to steal what I feel are our natural resources and get rich over them. The section on what the oilmen did in OK to screw the people out of taxes on the oil is sickening.
It became too hard to ignore organized crime after the chance interruption and rather comedic flight through the woods of the participants after they spotted the police setting up a road block but letting the first car through after a brief stop to record the License plate data. Apparently they didn't have everything in place yet, but did have another road block being set up further down the road that would take firmer action. The others, seeing the car allowed through, started heading out in a line of cars but were stopped, causing them to try to get away on foot through the woods. An estimated 50 were not caught but 63 were.
I wonder what the cameras at Mar-A-Lago would show of the potential bribery donors .
HCR cites the fundamental determinant of Republican politics: “The American cowboy burst back into prominence with the advent of the Marlboro Man in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision”. That’s when the white working class degenerated into a mob that would do anything, including, we see now, trade democracy for autocracy, in a desparate attempt to preserve their systemic advantages over black people. Eventually, they sabotaged their only real economic power, labor unions, to join their cowboy hero, Reagan, on a trickle-down trip to oblivion.
I have to disagree that cowboy culture re-entered American life with the Marlboro Man. Cowboy films and radio programs were exceptionally popular all through the 30s and onward. As a child, my main fantasy figure was a cowboy!
Annie, I often wonder if all those western cowboy shows on TV (beginning, for me, with our first TV set in the early 1950s) with their ubiquitous pistols, and rifles, and gun fights, may be part of the root cause of America's apparent infatuation with guns. Us kids absorbed a whole lotta fantasy gun-play growing up here in America.
The way I remember it, everyone was practicing "open carry" with a six-shooter in a holster, with a belt that held ammo in appropriately-sized loops. And the "good guys" wore white hats, and the "bad guys" wore black hats. Zorro and the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Gene Autry sang. The good guys always had to win in the end.
Ooh, you could always tell Hoppy in a crowd because of the white hat. But Roy Rogers sang too, smiled a lot, rode a palomino, and said "Dig dirt, Trigger..." And the episode always ended with the hero falling off a cliff. Or hanging on to one. And then, thrill on thrill, there was "The Oregon Trail" with its ever-lengthening synopsis. I thought for a long time that the "Light Cavalry" overture had been composed just for the opening titles.
"With his cowboy hat and western ranch, Reagan deliberately tapped into this mythology, as well as the racism and sexism in it, when he promised to slash taxes and regulations to free individuals from a grasping government. He promised that cutting taxes and regulations would expand the economy. As wealthy people—the “supply side” of the economy– regained control of their capital, they would invest in their businesses and provide more jobs. Everyone would make more money."
Except they did not "invest in their businesses". They use the earnings to do 'stock buybacks' to increase the value of their stock options and become even richer. washing and repeating.
Call me crazy but bribery is illegal and Trump just promised to change the rules if he receives a giant donation from the oil industry. Will this nightmare ever end? Thanks, Heather!
And his many good points? Devotion to evil? Addiction to Philandering? His bleaching hairdresser? His red faced cosmetician? Hiding all his college transcripts? Draft dodging? Lying about applying to many colleges? Failure in multiple marriages over decades? His blasphemy? Lying to the press? His lawyers? Read the papers that were supported by cabinet colleagues. His disrespect for the honest? Racism? Fascism? Pathological dishonesty and lying? Xenophobia? Bankruptcy addiction? Banning Abortion? Collaboration and admiration for vicious dictators? Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Mr. Kim of N. Korea? China’s top thug?
He’s hated and feared by members of his own party, by his vice president, by his cabinet, by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the military and by 90% of the mainstream press.
And yet he continues to get away with all of it, the illegal and the barely legal, supported by various ass-kissing (or plain cowardly) Republican members of Congress, Supreme Court judges, et al. It's tiring.
Indeed. The Grand Old Party of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Dwight David Eisenhower, our greatest, is worshipping a draft dodger, a lying racist fascist criminal that rapes, marries three times, sleeps with porn stars, loves dictators, called Covid-19 a hoax, cheats his contractors, is a pathological liar, hides his transcripts and threatens to kill his opponents.
Thank you, as always, for providing both background and context to the ongoing corruption and chicanery that are being perpetrated upon our citizens and our nation. The pieces of the puzzle continue to fall into place, but many of us wouldn’t see the larger picture without your expertise as a historian and scholar.
“Finally there was the eye-popping story broken by Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow in the Washington Post on Thursday, revealing that last month, at a private meeting with about two dozen top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, Trump offered to reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental rules designed to combat climate change and to stop any new ones from being enacted in exchange for a $1 billion donation.”
I’ll have to find the article (Bulwark, maybe) warning that the “October surprise” we’ve all come to expect will be a massive rise in fuel prices. Which of course only Orange man can fix. Buckle up.
Professor Richardson. Keep these coming. Real cowboys will sooner or later understand that Donald Trump doesn’t even know how to fire a pea shooter. The biggest fake city dude in history. He’s nobody’s pardner.
All hat and no cattle…of course too many ‘cowboys’ look like the Bundys and their bizarre tribe of radical moronic version of Mormon. Of course Donny would not last a day on a horse.
Brilliant Letter. 🙏
Let’s get up tomorrow, fight another day.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Indeed, let’s fight every day until Nov5. We can’t get NO Satisfaction unless we save our Democracy! You all really can help by helping brilliant Harvard students who are registering thousands of seniors in more than 1,500 high schools and 348 Community Colleges only in 78 truly competitive Congressional Districts and 16 Senate elections based exclusively on protecting reproductive rights, gun safety and fighting climate change. Please go to www.TurnUp.US and contribute generously as this is a tax deductible C3 contribution! They are the real thing folks! Thank you!
@Ira. Volunteer.
Millions of unregistered women trend heavily Democratic. Register Democrats -- save democracy.
https://www.fieldteam6.org/
I fear that we will be fighting for decades to come, to protect and expand democracy to all Americans, as the reactionaries and supremacists have infiltrated our town, state and federal governments, so that at all levels we are being governed by corrupt people subject to bribery. So gird your loins, sharpen your swords and words, and sally forth.
Lynn, infiltrate is an excellent word to describe what the wing nuts are doing: all those political entities plus school boards and county governments.
It's the "R" long game. One of the Koch brothers specialties.
May the remaining two brothers die already.
They are not libertarians. They are Fascists.
I think that's what Benjamin Franklin was speaking about when he said, '…a republic, if you can keep it.' Having a say in government is not a one and done deal -- it's a lifelong commitment for better or for worse, etc. The depiction of politics as something too rough for women or too complicated or corrupt for the average citizen is designed to thwart any efforts to be involved. Now, the fascists add violence to the mix -- something from the days when 'the rule of law' was not the standard, when might made right. Primitive and effective, especially when they create fear or distrust or disgust -- whatever makes people give up wanting to be citizens, wanting to vote even.... Like the Ukrainians, we can never let up -- we will never be perfect, but we can never stop our efforts.
I just finished “ all the Shahs Men “ by Stephen Kinzer which outlines how British and American interests in Iranian oil over threw a democratically elected government and laid the groundwork for the current Islamic state. I find it ironic that Trump is trying to overthrow our democracy via bribes for oil as well.
Money talks. In every language. The Russian Orthodox Church doesn't seem to be motivated by Christianity.... Makes me recall the song from "Cabaret" with its lurid sensationalism of the vulgarity/money connection.
CU is allowing this buying of our country to the extremely wealthy that think they owe noting to their success and think workers are just a cost item on their accounting sheets.
We are fighting the historical worship of mammon ($$$$$$) vs. the protections for the least of thee.
Thank you. Hope they don’t bury supporters in inane emails.
I don't understand the lame brain emails -- totally unresponsive to the interested voter, much less the activist with repetitious wording and content completely oblivious to current happenings in their dependence on panic or outrage. Frustrating that these efforts and resources are spent this way.
Especially since republican over-the-top insanity scripts better messages than any pundit could come up with. Yet, it's the same old crap. Joe gets some zingers in but he is ignored because he's not on trial, I suppose. Who knew...
Makes me wonder if the 'journalists' covering the news for reporting to the citizens don't realize that's what they're supposed to be doing -- that they are essential to a democratic republic, indeed, to any knowledgeable citizenry. They don't seem to understand the basic structural morality of this system of governance. Instead, they seem to be marketing a really bad movie series forged from TV shows like Dallas and Gunsmoke and As The World Turns.
They follow the money, Elon claims to promote free speech, but he spews bull schitt more than anybody. Years ago I watched ATWT, it made more sense than the world I live in today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK2uZvecDb8
While they don't mention it, postcards and letters to voters is yet another way to fight.
Amen to that and other campaigns, indeed!
Sorry Frank.., but (I fear), it has a phony ring to it. Seniors comprise a ton of people who are deadset in their distaste for LGBTQ; lack of border control; affirmative action policies; run-away inflation & energy costs; to name a few. Forget the fact that they (we..) are the recipients of so many benefits, every day. They're minds are made up, and Joe isn't the answer. The vitriol out of FauxNews is all they hear. So good luck to the best intentions of the "brilliant Harvard students", I hope they're prepared for the visceral gnorance-factor they will encounter.
I hope you have not forgotten those of us Octos who marched in the mid to later 20C.....Civil Rights, Viet Nam, Women's Rights, No Nukes, Same Sex Marriage....We are still here!
Thank you Susan for noticing my comment. I'm only headed toward toward 81, so I'm new on this "octo" field. Trouble, there are fewer and fewer of us, but that doesn't mean we're not on board with what the heck is going on. However, there are a pile of folks that look older than we but aren't! And, those are the the bozos I'm largely referring to. Their minds are made up with the facts.. "the facts" so convincingly presented to them. They have absolutely no use for what LFA tries to present, or anyone else. We're surrounded by them - and they're mostly white, or 'think' they are... and that's good enuf for em! Ughhh.
Honestly?? You're talking about the Woodstock generation, right?? The first huge group to openly accept and enfold gay people?? I hitch-hiked to San Francisco in tie-dye with flowers in my hair, and I will never, ever be one of those fictional "seniors" you describe. You are always on dangerous ground when you try to speak for such an enormous "group". Perhaps you need to more clearly define who you are referring to.
Linda.. you're right.! and.., hohohoo,, the "fictional" bunch, as you put it, are mostly dead or suffering from dimentia (sp). I'm sure part of that group, but not quite dead (yet). I must Thank you for being kind to me in your comment. Todays "seniors" are indeed the 60's generation . I guess what we're stuck with ("we" being you as well as "I") are the offspring of folks who have harbored ill-gotten prejudices from their peers, parents, or politicians. And, most of those "folks" are white, hahahaaa, or THINK of themselves as such (nobody is pure-white!). I guess those are the 'humans' I'm referring to. Sorry I was off base in my own little rant. I'll try to do better.
Ira, unfortunately, November 5, 2024, is not the drop dead date - and let’s hope that it is not “literally speaking” because I still remember how horrendous it felt on the morning of November 9, 2016, when we learned that Hillary had lost. We will be fighting to right our ship for several general elections to come after 2024, even if Biden wins again, based upon the fuel that trump added to the burning embers and the fire that he ignited and that continues to burn in America. We need to have a smart, vigorous and youthful democratic presidential administration - male and/or female at the helm, plus a supermajority in both Houses of Congress along with beginning to put democrats [back] in control of a majority of our states’ governmental bodies!!!
Every day my comments are "Vote Blue to save our democracy" and one individual has been constantly berating me saying we don't have a democracy, we are a Constitutional Republic as stated in the Constitution.
Harvard..., really? Now that certainly is a liberally funded institution. Isn't it. Being curious and admittedly sceptical (my nature), I googled and found this: "Harvard has the highest retention rate of any college in the USA, 98%. And that is defined by the government as completion of the program that the student began within 150% of the time normally required, so 98% of students complete their program within 6 years". Well, doggone it.., good for them. All that says to moi is that all those 'lucky' (mostly privileged, I would surmise) kids, those 'pre-qualified kids' walked out of there with a piece of paper they paid dearly for. Notably, 51.8% were Fe-male. Simple-males' bungled their way to 48.2%..? My point being, why are 51.8% allowing themselves to be subjected to this hocus-pocus healthcare environment, dick-tated to them? Huh? Go ahead.., help me understand will ya.
If your question at the end of your comment here is rhetorical, then you don't need any help understanding. If it isn't, consider that the deck is stacked against women from day one, in a variety of ways.
OK Ally, I guess that's what I, along with the rest of the "male" population need help in. Because, coming out of the womb, I don't think we are instinctively prejudiced. Seems in this progressive-world, the education system in the USA has lost its compass and "mothers" are dealing more and more with a warped conception of 'common sense' principles.
Yes! That last paragraph was a superb wrap-up!! On one hand trump, one of the most depraved men of human history, has been the source of my hand-winging, but on the other, my daily prayer of his demise is proving very powerful....
Unfortunately, Sophia, I don't see Trump as one of the most depraved men, but only a member of the worst class of humans that acts only selfishly. This class is vast, likely a majority of humanity, that is best kept in check by a democratic system of government. That is why this putrid class of humans rails against the checks on power inherent in democracy. (And that is why I can't vote for any Republican candidate until MAGA is suppressed and diminished again.)
Maybe not the most depraved who ever lived, but even the Ayn Rand disciples are beginning to reject him.
Interesting. Could you describe what you've heard, read, or seen?
Paul Ryan's statement that he will not be voting for trump is the core of my opinion. Ryan has been very outspoken as an Ayn Rand disciple. The rest is rumor and conjecture.
Sophia, I often express that to the TV while having his whiny voice on mute.
MTG's voice certainly competes with his for annoyance.
I mute her too.
I am not religious but pray to the powers that be in the Universe. I bet there is a few million of us praying for the same. If the wish is granted and I die the same day, I will die VERY HAPPY!!
You don't have to be religious to communicate with Divine Intelligence. Dr. Larry Dossey has enacted studies proving prayer works. Actually, Divine Intelligence, as I write in my book, The Divine Language of Coincidence, brings about what we need even if we don't pray. It's happened throughout my life. Now scientists are interested in my book and coincidence (look up the Scientific and Medical Network). They're catching up!
Gold indeed. This is amazing.
Exactly what I will do. Thank you for your succinct reaction. Gnite
My sentitments exactly!!
It just occurred to me that when "fighting for democracy" felt like just another thing on a very long "to do" list, I was very resistant. But what it has offered to me is a powerful sense of belonging to a community of fellow citizens who care as much as I do or more about not letting Trump and his ultra-right wing puppeteers (in the background since the 70's) take over my country! So here's another community of post-card writing, phone banking, candidate supporting, ignorance fighting citizens - my home grassroots group, markersfordemocracy.org. Check us out!
Yes, Exactly. His extremism ignited awareness of what's at stake and action to prevent it The problems have been brewing as you say, .it was here before, but easy to miss when the other side seemed civil.
I tried to like and if wouldn't stay light. So. Verbal liked!
Defeating DJT in November is paramount, but we must not overlook how we got here. Independents broke for Obama (hope and change) then switched to Trump (drain the swamp), and back to Biden in 2020. While most voters want our government to govern in a truly representative fashion, many don't understand that, over time, our government has been designed to operate as it does now. That's why my "fight" is spreading the gospel of Gehl.
“You have a choice to make. You can continue applying your agency elsewhere, indirectly perpetuating the political-industrial complex that undermines the very causes you are prioritizing separately (and nobly, to be sure). Or you can redirect your agency to further catalyze a twenty-first-century wave of political innovation to break partisan gridlock and save our democracy; in which case you’re advancing every cause. Without a sea change, our political system will continue to do more harm to education, the environment, the economy—you name it. A transformation of the politics industry can do more than we can do on our own to help those sacred corners of America.”
Gehl, Katherine M.. The Politics Industry (p. 172). Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
There are 3 links in my profile containing more information.
🌟💙🌟💙🌟💙💯
So agree Pj Jough-Hana. The entire letter was spectacular but the last paragraph pulled it all together with truthful simplicity. He must be defeated in November.
The cowboy myth, almost by definition, involves lots of fiction.
As Heather mentions Stormy in connection with today's ongoing fictions, let's appreciate further how Stormy spoke to fiction, when she testified how the sex was real, in contrast to the scripted.
If she were doing the scripting (as she has done for cameras professionally for years), she emphasized how she’d have done a much better job on that.
So, too, in the larger America, the effing has been real as the billionaire classes offshored the millions of jobs, indebted students in “higher” ed, stacked the judiciary with the right-wing corrupted, turned social media to divisiveness, and rid all the schools of any effective humanities.
Thus the scripts for all have sunk to the low qualities as Stormy said she’d have improved.
Americans know Trump’s a sham, a bragging pussy-grabber, racketeer, rapist, racist, and ally to the world’s cruelest dictators and murderers.
But he entertains with fantastic hyperbole, stinging epithets, adjectives glorying insults, bing-bing-boing-bong sound effects to accompany his scripts, and hand gestures constantly jerking off accomplices on both sides of him. Straight from vaudeville, he’s the only person in America still in touch with the public’s hunger for stories, narrative, character (assassination), and all the other aspects of scripting Stormy would do better.
We’re effed, as was she by reality, by an old man who invited young woman to dinner only to be given something quite other than dinner.
What educated our elites all totally unequipped with any humanities any better than those of the fat, orange-encrusted made-up con guy?
Phil, I don’t disagree with your general statement of opinion in your comment. What continues to amaze me is the millions of our fellow Americans who can be so easily duped, manipulated, and roused to anger by a charlatan. I’ve always believed in America but that belief system has been stressed ever since 2016. I trust that reality will prevail over emotion by the time of the election.
They aren’t duped. They know what they’re voting for: the Republican promise to preserve systemic white advantages. On this, Republicans have delivered and will continue to deliver. White voters aren’t duped, but they are delusional. The systemic advantages Republicans deliver won’t help working-class white people because they have no power over the Republican oligarchs that will make the rules. Systemic white advantages will remain in place but will fail to do working-class white people any good.
In 2021, I was thinking of running for the school board in our small rural district in ME. My incentive to run was the rumors that two of the people running for the board were white Christian nationalists that wanted to ban books from the library and alter the curriculum to align with their Christian principles including daily prayers.
Two of the current board members had not decided whether to continue and these two were the only ones running. I filled out the paperwork and when I went to turn them in, the two current members had filed their papers. The challengers were soundly defeated by the incumbents.
While researching for the role, I looked at the test scores of the students on the standardized tests. One couldn't help noticing the girls outscored the boys in every category and every age group. I also checked out the scores in surrounding districts and the test score patterns were similar.
I talked with the school principal and asked her why she thought this was happening. She said that for the boys, it wasn't cool to be smart and that basically they were lazy. She told me about how she tried to motivate them in various ways and continues to do so.
Is this an example of the white privilege cowboy mentality? It sure looks like it. Our community voted for Biden but it was very close to 50/50. The only way I see this changing is if the cowboy mentality is exposed as being fraudulent.
Thanks Heather for exposing the Republicans and their conspiracy myths. They will stop at nothing.
As for the prototype Marlboro Man actor, he died of lung cancer. Too bad he didn't regard the government studies and warnings. And Trump's populist keep-everything-open and go-without-masks attitude resulted in a million American deaths from Covid, the highest per capita of industrialized nations. What a blight this man is on Americans. He's beyond criminal; he's a horror story.
Gary, nothing worse for a high school guy than to be seen as a nerd. Certain to be bullied among other things. Then there is sports which in my thinking, often gets in the way of first rate education, partly because of the hiring of coaches for teaching positions. The myth is that sports build character, teamwork, and other assorted bs. I invite purveyors of that myth to take a good look at college athletics which is now nothing but bribes, egos, money, and the ability to leave a team in the transfer portal.
Michelle, i would like to disabuse you of your notion of high school athletics. It can be easy to fall into the stereotypes of redneck football coaches that force prayer on the 50 yardline. That is small part of the reality. High school athletics (soccer and Alpine ski racing) have helped define my daughters as more than pretty and smart. Through sport they have built physical strength, teamwork, and most importantly inner power and self esteem that will propel them forward in the world. They have learned physical discipline that will give them a leg up in health and longevity. They often kick the boys ass in ski racing! You need only look at college basketball, soccer and world cup alpine ski racing to see that American women have taken center stage and are the foremost household names BEFORE men in these disciplines. And my girls are at the top of their class in academics as well! It is not a myth...
Nothing will disabuse me of my opinion of athletics as I outlined it. Please do not accuse me of stereotyping because I worked with a good number of people who were coaches and coached girls' basketball myself. I love what your daughters have achieved and I am not absolutely against sports, but they caused no small amount of problems in our small school. I was the first to coach girls' basketball and it would take me quite a while to tell all the awful things I and the kids endured. We had some awful teachers because they were hired to coach and i am not saying the some of the other teachers who coached were bad. The booster club at our school hired the head football coach and they picked some pieces of work including one who lied on his resume. I could go on with this as well. We were season ticket holders our the U of Oregon women's basketball team for years. We have had to stop partly because of the drive is too much for us at our age and partly because we are dismayed by the state of the main college sports which have become all about bribery and leaving if players do not get the playing time they deserve. And of course television revenue. I am sure there are other reasons, but NIL and the transfer portal has wrecked havoc. One Oregon State player who said he was staying and then left whined about not getting the house he was promised. When we have a housing problem like we have, that one really stuck in my craw. We still bought our tickets and sold them to friends, but even they turned those good seats down this year....they have a longer drive than we do. As for grades, generally females do better than males.
I applaud Biden's push for recognition of teachers. They are under attack, in my opinion, because they are great role models and influencers of students.
That being said, there does seem to be an attitude of some students that it is not cool to be educated.
I HIGHLY recommend that the Letter's "bookclub" read Andy Borowitz's "Profiles in Ignorance". It is astounding.
I wonder how long that “ cowboy mentality “ would survive if not supported by all those sweet cowgirls.
But Gary, isn’t RFKJR our best hope to finish the job his dad and uncle started?Everone can see how feeble President Biden is becoming.If he was capable of beating Trump the DNC wouldn’t be so focused on smearing RFKJR.
Vote Biden or Elect Trump.
RFKJR is the spoiler du jour. Jill Stein redux.
The Kennedy family have made a very public point of endorsing Joe Biden. Whose policies are in keeping with the better aspects of the Kennedy legacy.
John & Lin, This would be the same RFK Jr who recently came out saying "a parasitic worm got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”? <https://people.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-says-doctors-found-a-dead-worm-in-his-brain-8645282>
I can’t vote for President Biden because he hasn’t broken the corporate control over our government and because the DNC imposed unfair rules in the nominational primaries that weren’t democratic
John, what will it take for you to grasp that "not voting for Biden" or "voting for RFK, Jr" - IS A VOTE OF SUPPORT FOR TRUMP AND THE end of DEMOCRACY? It is obvious. It is a fact. Do you not see the greater danger in a win by the GQP? A win for the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025? A win for more judges bred by the Federalist Society operated by the oligarchs who are dedicated to the furthering the Feudalism that Democrats are fighting?
Your protest vote for the guy who thinks cell phones give us "leaky brains" and "vaccines cause autism" would confirm only your gullibility and a life of fantasy. A person can be well intentioned and still aid in the destruction of a nation and its way of life.
If you don't vote for Joe, you are aiding abetting the greatest threat to our nation since Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.
Or...you really do like Donald Trump and the judges he installed who removed the right of women to determine when to have a child?
The choice is binary. Biden, democracy and decency or a further descent in Hell for women . Biden or concentration camps. Biden or the destruction of Federal regulations that protect our water, air and the health of future generations. If don't vote for Biden you are literally damning our children to illness and early death.
Read Project 2025. Then Decide. If after that you still won't vote for saving our world, perhaps cell phones do cause something...
Bill you are freaking out. My vote for RFKJR is not a vote for Trump. I believe he is well on his way to getting on the ballots in all 50 states. I believe that if he does get on all the ballots he will be poised to win. If he doesn’t get on the ballots I will concede. We are at a unique point in history. Both major party candidates are disliked by many. Independent voters now outnumber others.I believe RFKJR is meant to carry on the vision his dad and uncle had for our country.He believes it too, and he paid attention to how they led our country so he can do the same.I remember when JFK was shot.I believe Allen Dules was behind JFK ‘s death. I want to give Bobby the chance to do what his dad and uncle did.
oh please. RFK Jr. is another narcissist. And really, truly, worm-brained.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – In the latest setback for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid, a worm who dined in the candidate’s brain wrote a brutal Yelp review shortly before dying, the reviewing site confirmed on Monday.
The worm’s review began on a discouraging note, claiming that Kennedy’s brain was “almost impossible to find.”
“Once I managed to get there, I couldn’t believe how cramped it was,” the worm continued. “I’m all for intimate dining but this place was ridiculously tiny.”
The worm also slammed the noise level in the candidate’s brain, complaining, “I couldn’t hear myself think with all the different voices in there.”
With one star, Kennedy’s brain ranks last in Yelp’s “Worm Dining” category, tied with Kristi Noem’s brain."
- Andy Borowitz
I don't agree. RFK Jr. will install an entire new cabinet and with his wacky ideas about abortion and vaccinations, do you really trust him to surround himself with what currently is probably the best cabinet of our lifetimes.
I don't like the word everyone when describing Biden's health. I am only unhappy with a few decisions he has made and his values match mine to a tee. I just saw a survey that said that 38% of voters feel his health is not an issue to be concerned about.
And if he dies, I trust Kamala.
Thank you for being respectful. I think many democrats are supporting President Biden in spite of his age because they really want Harris. She demonstrated her communication skills in the Bret Kavanaugh hearings. She gaslighted him to tears.She isn’t for me.
John, I highly suggest that you sign up for both the daily email "What Did Biden Do Today?" and check the official White House website under the tab "results". It is truly sad that the mainstream media does not report on all his achievements, but satin pj's or brain worms is a much more interesting story to the National Enquirer mindset mentality.
Slinging the "feeble" label at Biden with no supportive data is merely expressing your opinion. Perhaps you might populate your empty substack with more informative posts.
John, that brain worm destroyed RFKJR's brain He is a joke.
No. Say what?
I respectfully disagree,his dad would be proud of him and President Biden is the one living in the past!
The guy is not a candidate for out times. His father would not endorse him, I bet.
That’s snark, right? (Please tell us you’re not serious.)
Jon, he is very serious. Just let the one trick pony prance without comment. Kinda like a couple others who seem beyond fixated on the Middle East.
Yeah, sleeping through school, secure in the knowledge being white will get you a "good job" doesn't work anymore.
For every trumper I encounter, their education comes from Fox U. They ARE duped, too. Until we can close down the Fox hate machine, democracy is dying.
MaryPat, I agree that Trump followers' beliefs are validated by FOX, Bannon, and others that portray Trump as a victim and Biden as evil.
There's one word thar Professor Richardson used today, which I think sums up everything that Trump is and tries to do. CONVOLUTED.
We've all expressed our opinions, our outrage at what Donald Trump has done to destroy our democracy. We've expressed our disbelief that so many people have fallen under his spell and support him because he validates their feelings of racism, entitlement, exclusion, and their fear that their way of life will be threatened by President Biden. Funny thing is, Biden has done more for average Americans than Trump has ever thought about doing. Now that's certainly convoluted.
So, with our astonishment being known, i so appreciate all the suggestions of what we can do to remove Trump from power and to reelect President Biden.
Rex, no they aren't although I do wonder about some women who seem to think this guy is sent by God. Also some people do love the class clown because then nothing gets done and they can have a good laugh at the expense of the students who want to learn and authority.
Even the white wealthy and powerful oligarchs better watch out.
Well said.
Sadder reality, Gary -- that millions of Americans have no education in any humanities.
It's not just one charlatan. It's all the schools void of humanities, so many elites so unable to model any uses of our many great novelists, memoirists, historians, composers, playwrights, screenwriters, photographers, film makers.
We need them, Gary.
Remember how William Carlos Williams wrote in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":
"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."
Remember how in "Night Mail," when Auden wrote "Men long for news," he meant letters, first, but also the more humane news from our best in all our arts?
The fraction of Americans who have no education in any humanities was always miniscule and never had a significant effect on elections. What does affect US elections is white fear of losing their dominance. White dominance was nearly absolute until the mid-1960s. Then, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act scared the bejesus out of white voters, and they flocked to the party that, with the emergence if the Nixon-Atwater Southern Strategy, promised to deliver white Americans from demographic threats.
Yes, of course, true what you say, Rex.
But equally true what happened a hundred years earlier, when the Know-Nothings agitated hatred against the German protestants and the Irish Catholics then immigrating into the U.S.
They were all white men, women, and children, Rex, but the English whites hated them, hated cities, hated industrial works, hated to be taxed for federal help in transportation infrastructure, in education, in health clinics and hospitals.
Lincoln persisted. Perhaps his greatest achievement -- in 1862 signing the Justin Morrill land grant legislation which gave America the world's greatest public universities, which in turn welcomed all the other ethnicities that came to the U.S. after the Civil War, and well into the 20th century.
Yes. Same phenomenon. Different demographics.
Yep, and Obama propelled the Republicans into the Tea Party and later Freedom Caucus. Social conscience doesnt play well in large segments of white America, and perhaps elsewhere as well.
This comment from Phil is too esoteric for me at 6:00 am. Poetry and novelists are not the first things I think of when I consider the humanities. Kids hate the various literature classes required in high school for the very examples you provided. One has to have an excellent teacher to help students find the value, meaning, and appreciation for such.
Christine, I find myself in complete agreement with you. I consider myself fairly well read, but my perusal of and enjoyment of the great "literature" has eluded me my entire life (which I am certain bothered my mother, the poet and English lit lover). My interests tended towards the more biographical/autobiographical paths; to illustrate this, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of my all-time favorite novels, while prose and poetry do not interest me at all, and "searching for the meaning" in something that is well written but (to my mind) so "out there" that I have to search beyond the words for the meaning holds no interest at all.
My "humanities" courses came in the form of History classes, the study within sociology and psychology, some philosophy, and the like. I joke (sort of) that the reason I majored in Criminology at college was it took the parts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy that I was interested in and created a field of study for me. I am glad that while it didn't prepare me for the nuts and bolts of how to be a cop, it did prepare me for recognizing the evil and good that mankind does, and its impact on behavior and conduct.
Ally,
I am not a novel reader - read about 7 in the past 70 years. I am a bit of a writer and do READ stuff relevant to things I want to write about. I never went to college, but did my wife's college humanities work while she was becoming an RN. Did a lot of research reading for that in 1986 (No WWW - just Books, Magazines & Microfisch at the library) and actually got good grades for her. Especially the long treatise on "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," in which "she" referenced her husband's account of Afghanistan 4 years earlier in 1975. :)
Ppl have actually chastised me for not enjoying reading novels as they do - and being rebellious I raise my fist and shout Don't Tell Me How to Enjoy!
My thing is movies and have written over 500 reviews posted on the 'Net. However, I have recently read a 1909 novel, "The Island of Regeneration" and wrote a book report related to it and its 1915 silent movie. All of this started after watching the 1980 movie "The Blue Lagoon" and discovering it was from a 1908 novel, of the same title by Irish author H. De Vere Stacpoole, which I am currently reading. I have started getting into the daily reading, and sometimes read extra chapters just because it is interesting. I even sense a connection to the world of 115 years past by what I am reading. I just hope this Novel Reading Habit of late is not addictive.
Kids "hate" the literature classes because no one has taught them how to read, and social media reinforces the idea that reading is obsolete. Humanities teachers make a difference when they are allowed to teach.
Phil,
I just checked "Night Mail" you referenced fro W.H. Auden. I am of that last generation that dealt in mail written on paper, having put my Uncle Bill's WWII letters written to my grandmother in the Library of Congress' Veteran History Project archives. Then there are the letters written to me by my first GF in Turkiye where I was stationed in the Air Force in 1964. Still have them six decades later.
"Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong."
I never heard of Auden until 1970, while reading an obscure poem by him in the short lived Ralph Ginzberg "Avant Garde" magazine titled "A Day for a Lay," which emboldened my budding homosexual yearnings. My continuing education in the Humanities. :)
Thank you, Rob, for your good quoting of more Auden.
So much life to be lived when we're more open to details. And so many more "others" we can happily live with.
You were obviously never in the military. I was, and I was never around so many white male morons in one place at one time anywhere else in all my life. Yes, there are good people, great people, one meets in the military, but the population of morons/cannon fodder is overhwelming.
You have a point.
We're looking for veterans to continue their service. https://www.veteransforallvoters.org/take-action
Obey, obey, obey, look out for others' backs in the platoon....
What is the spirit of the bayonet?
To kill. To kill. To kill!
Of course. The rigor of military training to is make those ks more efficient. Mind you, while i don't promote sanctioned violence, I'm not a pacifist. And, I'm more than glad German and Japanese imperial ambitions failed in spades
I believe it is true that anger is a very effective method of combating depression, and I bet there are a lot of people out there who would be depressed because they did not get what they wanted. Anger helps them believe that following Voldemort, he who must not be elected, they will become strong, rich, and fertile, and powerful. The idea that this is a mirage cannot be admitted to their thought pattern, for they will again become depressed, and feel worthless.
Frank, intuitively, I would have written what you wrote about depression-anger-GOP, until I saw a reputable study that right wingers are generally happier than left wingers. See link below.
BUT one psychodynamic explanation is that according to Fromm, thoe with authoritarian streaks are sadomasochists, so they ar enot miserable but happily 'getting off' on their pathology?
"All of the people who support an authoritarian power structure are equally authoritarian as well. Someone who uses this strategy reconnects themselves to the world through what Fromm calls a type of sadomasochism. Two words there—sadism and masochism: sadism being the desire to control others, to dominate exploit or steal from others; masochism being the desire to submit to some power and be controlled or dominated. The authoritarian is sadistic in the sense that they want to support an authoritarian setup so that other people and groups will be controlled. But they are masochistic in the sense that they themselves want to submit to that authority as part of the process." Link at bottom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/conservatives-liberals-depression-anxiety.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rk0.mFP-.pssXzU1T67VC&smid=url-share
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-151-transcript?rq=sadomasochism%20
The history of the human civilization involves a long litany of authoritarian groups seeking absolute authority.
A know a few of these.
Feels right on.. erghh…
Which most of the Trumpscum are. Losers born in Loserville.
The ones in my family just like that pecking order, as long as they are the top “peckers.”
“He Who must not be elected” is gold. Outstanding!
American women should not vote for the moron trump, he wants to stick his fingers in your vagina.
Reality has been hijacked by propaganda, MSM is stirring from a deep coma. Fellow Americans in a trance, all by design. Don’t trust or hope, kick arse.
My belief in America (I hate that name, as America is North+Central+South America), has been tested since 2001, our response to 9/11. Clearly after 9/11, Cheney and Rumsfeld were allowed to run amok. And USians (my word for US residents) embraced this lie!
Sorry, if I were older, I'd obviously add in the Vietnam War, but I was only born in 1974.
You could add in quite a bit more, even since you were born! The invasion of Iraq on trumped up charges just for one thing, which soon gave rise to ISIS, then Afghanistan, a failed cultural makeover.
What further amazes me is all of the Republican office holders who fight for his approval while supporting his criminal a$$!!
Not amazing. It's the spoils system at work.
By defunding education, we traded the cost of education for the high cost of ignorance.
I think it is magical thinking to think Trump voters are ignorant dupes. Trump delivered for the populists and the plutocrats - the Supreme Court to overturn Roe and tax breaks for the wealthy. And all those 'dupes' were smart enough to know that voting is a united effort to take power.
Unlike the doctors Stein and West - who really dupe their followers.
lin•, I think that to put the MAGAts as "ignorant dupes" is indeed "magical thinking". Perhaps some of the more...searching for word... patently "out there" representations are, perhaps, ignorant dupes (thinking of the lady wearing adult diapers and sporting a sign that said "real men wear diapers", or some of the ones that Jordan Klepper (I think) interviews.) Many of the ones that I know are not ignorant dupes, but conservative, Christian, heteronormative, and of a patriarchal mindset who do not like seeing BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people getting their "special rights" which are in reality those rights that they have themselves. They feed on the "conservative" "news" channels and accept their propaganda as fact.
A racist (even a closet racist); a Scrooge; those whose lack of drive, courage or belief in themselves gave birth to an irrational envy and selfishness so deeply rooted that logic cannot disturb its carapace — this too common combination of human disturbance is pervasive in our society, and their feelings are kindling to the GOP.
Feelings usually trump reason and the GOP preys upon these various, defensive groups — inveterate racists; gun owners; those who pervert their religious beliefs to relegate science and medicine to a dark, suspicious magic; the thoughtlessly literal-minded who accept simple-sounding illogical deductions as reasonable, provided its conclusions agree with their unexamined feelings; those who express a dominant facade despite their personal failures, who necessarily lie to themselves; those whose sexuality is threatened merely by observing its variety; and those threatened by the human variety of life, thought and experience found in inanimate books and art, who seek to portray them as weaponized against their creed and self-determination.
These, all, the GOP seeks as though for truffles in a forest and stirs them into a powerful broth; for power is the goal — at any cost; democracy irrelevant.
Well said. Thanks.
Thank you for reading. It's a bit long, but after reading Letters From an American and Civil Discourse, I can't lead my day until I empty the my mind.of the invading response. I feel compulsive until I consider the times.
Well said, Russell. Much more poetic and complex thinking than I was able to articulate this morning (scurries off for my second cuppa bean juice)
Bean juice! Never heard that one. I like it!
"Magic bean juice" is what I usually call it!
A thanks — and a smile.
In the history book These Truths, by Jill Lepore, are the following paragraphs about the first, highly successful political campaign managers, Campaigns, Inc., aka The Lie Factory, founded in 1933. They never lost a campaign. Republicans have mastered their campaign strategy rules:
'Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming is good. Never explain anything. "The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support." Say the same thing over and over again. "We assume we have to get a voter's attention 7 times to make a sale". Subtlety is your enemy. "Words that lean on your mind are no good. They must dent it." Simplify, simplify, simplify. "A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. And Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think."
Make it personal. Candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn't have an opponent, invent one. Pretend that you are the voice of the people. You can't wage a defensive campaign and win. Never shy from controversy; instead win the controversy. "The average American doesn't want to be educated, he doesn't want to improve his mind; he doesn't want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are 2 ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only 2 that we have ever found successful." You can put on a fight ("He likes a good battle with no punches pulled"), or you can put on a show ("He likes the movies, he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades). "So, if you can't fight, PUT ON A SHOW! If you put on a good show, Mr. And Mrs. America will turn out to see it.'
Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were the husband-and-wife team that started Campaigns, Inc., the first full-time political consulting firm in the United States to manage a candidate's overall strategy, from messaging to financials. They exploited mass media and applied marketing techniques to politics, mostly for Republican Party candidates and conservative California issues. A rare loss was supporting Willkie against Roosevelt's 3rd term during WW2. A blemished win was supporting Japanese internment camps and the removal of Japanese from all of California. An enduring win still existing today is their media campaign starting in 1948 at the behest of the AMA to scuttle all attempts to create a national health insurance plan like that of most other advanced countries. (The first attempt was unfortunately called Compulsory Health Insurance, which gave Whitaker an easy way to equate it with Socialism.) For a $100,000 per year retainer and a $5 million nationwide ad budget, Campaigns Inc successfully turned a "sensible, popular, and urgently needed healthcare reform into a [political, socialist] boogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of people are still scared of it." ("The Lie Factory: How Politics Became a Business" by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker , Sept. 24, 2012
For a detailed article and photos of original documentation, see
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/campaigns-inc-california-state-archives/GwXxFH7isu_tJg?hl=en
By talking more about actual issues of governance by cooperation and compromise, Democrats simply don't appeal to the emotions that make for a thrilling fight or show.
But Trump has followed every rule: he both "fights" his imaginary foes and puts on a show via his rallies etc. His followers vote for his entertainment even while they are measurably the least educated and least informed parts of the populace.
The article and photos of the documentation were riveting. Thanks for the link. I’m not done yet and will return to it later. The comment threads to the HCR letters, routinely expose me to new information on historical events. Yours certainly fit that category.
Thank you, Barbara, for your link and your excellent detailing of history I'd not known.
Thank Jill Lepore. She wrote most of this comment in a way that makes history live in the Now, and she did the historical analysis. The through-line is just remarkable. I've saved her analysis and posted it multiple times since I first read it years ago. It remains germane to every election cycle.
I'd like to think that the American public has changed, and I do find hope that voting percentages have indeed risen, though it sometimes feels like it has risen only for the show or the fight and not for our civic duties.
The media carry a lot of blame for lax coverage of tfg and hyper-focus on Biden's age.
Many public schools are not teaching civics or critical thinking. The Texas Republican Party platform in 2012 specifically stated “ We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
Texas seems to be in the vanguard of evil….
I have friends who voted and even actively campaigned for him. One has a PhD in psychology the other an advanced degree in electrical engineering. Both kind compassionate guys. It baffles me that they can support this petty, mean, vulgar, lazy person who honestly is not witty or deep.
I hear you. I wonder if they get some emotional charge out of over the top anger. Adrenaline junkies perhaps?
I think you’re on to something
MM began in the glorious 50s, and much of what the Republicans stands for has been metastacing for several decades now. Trump didn't invent the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus, but he's definitely a delusional demagogic genius.
I don't think he has the "market share" he had in 2020.
https://rvat.org/
No folks hanging out w big flags so far this year in this little village…
I do hope, seen that one before. I suspect the gop is pinning its hopes on the electoral college.
I think a lot of Trump’s supporters figure it’s easier than working. Or thinking. Just let him confirm all your darkest thoughts.
40 years of Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh softened brains more than a worm in the brain.
I think they both had worms who ate what was left of their brains and then died in there.
Comedians don't pass by these obvious political ads, but Dems do. Go figure
Simply, comedic genius, Jeri 😂
James Carville, where is your comedic genius...
Excellent and well turned phrase, Jeri!
The phrases write themselves. Put some in ads, Dems. Not the pablum that I get in emails.
Agreed 100%!
Why is it so hard for them to do what is so easy
Eastern Republican BS! GOP financed by billionaires and the Heritage Foundation are corrupt and very dangerous. Power is important, democracy is not.
The MAGATS ae sheep and the Heritage crowd are wolves in sheep's clothing.
90% of MAGATs vote against their own economic and physical well being.
I think that many have absolutely no
Inkling as to what it means to give up democracy. If, please not, they get to find out, it will be too late. My son is 52. When he was in elementary school he once surprised me by saying: "Mommy: some people are too stupid to live." It became his motto.
Most particularly the too-rich, under-socialized computer geeks of Silly Con Valley. All the "Democrats" among them of previous years now ready to make Trump president so they can continue their "fratboy-bro" culture. Elmo Muck, whose father moved the family from Canada to South Africa after apartheid was created because he couldn't stand all the liberal ease of life in Canada. Muck needs to be brought down all the way, followed by Peter Thiel and the semi-socialized Mark Andreesen.
So many, there are so many of the rich vulgar, TCinLA.
They so want to lobotomize American education, to turn all humanity into repetitive units -- preferably most ill-paid units, gnomes and serfs all interchangeable with each other. All standardized-tested-to-death (and machine gradable).
Too true, Phil.
George Carlin was right…
Or was he left? Or was he taken?
This has been one of the most depressing factors in the societal shift that will challenge our democracy at its roots. I used to have a modicum of admiration for the computer geeks.
I do not believe that all computer geeks are created equal.
Thanks.
No need to thank me for the truth. I know some very well rounded computer geeks!
I do not believe that all computer geeks are created equal.
Most assuredly true, Elon and Bill Gates are from different planets
And... I seem to remember that most real cowboys weren't white.
Wasn't this one of those dirty menial jobs white Americans wouldn't take?
(Now, where did I remember that one from...?)
Nice attention to apt irony, Peter.
No one kept stats in those days. But I recall anecdotal info putting black Americans at not quite one third of the "cowboys" (boys and men working dangerous, menial ranch jobs).
The Mexican contingent was more than a third. Leaving whites not quite our 1950s beloved Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Lone Ranger, Have Gun Will Travel Paladin.
Thanks for the detailed confirmation, Phil.
Glad you got the message, which I posted 3 times in all because the first two responses to your message never came up on my screen, so I published it as a main comment.
I'm trying hard now to picture a very large orange-faced cowboy singing “Git along little dogies / It's your misfortune / Ain’t none o’ my own” to his human dogies...
But all I get is the White Knight falling off his horse every which way… And then his ballad…
*
I thanked him much for telling me
The way he got his wealth,
But chiefly for the wish that he
Might drink my noble health.
*
Yes, another real product of Looking Glass Land…
‘Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?’ Alice enquired.
‘Not yet,’ said the Knight. ‘But I've got a plan for keeping it from falling off.’
The "original" cowboys were vaqueros of Mexican, Indigenous, Mulatto, and African ancestry. Horses were reintroduced to the Americas in the 1500s by the Spanish as well as their traditions of herding cattle. Not much White about it.
Also Argentinian, not so?
Exactly Peter! The other 'lil secret' was that these cowboys were mainly Floridian people of color and out numbered their later to appear 'wild west' cowboys. E.g. https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/09/03/433194190/the-indian-cowboys-of-florida
Thank you.
So... I wasn't mistaken after all. Just -- as usual -- forgot my source. No historian, I.
Blacks went west into the cattle herding world, etc.
Hence the Confederates' desire to extend slavery westward...?
Heather's How the South Won the Civil War has material on this.
Ah, thanks.
Must read.
Indeed, that is one of her best.
Curious, Phil, I just came back to you with my memory (from goodness knows where) that most of the real original cowboys weren't white.
Message vanished when posted...
Anyway, seems the reality is that herding cattle was one of those dirty menial jobs white Americans wouldn't take... so the first real cowboys were...
Just look at the language even in the black-hat, white-hat westerns, Peter.
Almost everything about working cattle in the old West used Spanish terms from the 200 years before any Gringos turned up there.
¡Gracias, Compañero!
Well put, Phil.
Our eyes are now open.
This colossal scams ends now. With us.
"Give 'em a fight or give 'em a show. If you give 'em a good show, Mr. And Mrs. America will turn out and vote for it.' -- Campaigns, Inc. The first and highly successful campaign marketing firm. Trump followed all their rules. (Source : 'These Truths' by Jill Lepore)
Quite brilliant!
The onslaught daily leaves one astounded and wondering how to filter truth from fiction. I’ll admit my bias in that I no longer see any statement from the right with anything but doubt and derision. I’ve become that person who has decidedly taken a left turn in politics and become intolerant of the right, almost in any form. In any public conversation, I can temper myself. But privately, I’m seething.
Along with the rest of us, Bob.
Happy to hear from like minded friends.
Speaking of like minded friends, Bob, I’ve been concerned for several days now that I’ve not seen any posts from Keith Wheelok!
Hopefully soon!
Hopefully, Keith is well and will share his learned thoughts soon.
I’m losing what little strength I have left to temper myself, Bob.
Stay the course.
Remember to take therapeutic pauses with more calming effects then the political bullpit.
Astounded, tempered, seething. Sounds familiar…
I can relate to your wrath.
Why is this cheap criminal still able to menace our democracy? What broke in the mechanism to allow this, and can it be repaired in time? Or at all?
The wheels of justice turn slowly, in part because every criminal defendant has so many rights in this country, founded on the rule of law. But they do turn. Judge Merchan is trying very hard to avoid reversible error that could help an appeal succeed. And the Orange T*%d cannot pardon himself for a state conviction even if he wins in November. He WILL be held accountable some day, even if his extortion/bribery scheme with the fossil fuel industry succeeds and he gets a cool billion to support his interminable court battles. Have faith. And yes, get up tomorrow and keep fighting. We have to.
How did the Republicans get so far down into this sewer? I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. There were things that would simply disqualify a candidate from running. Not thinking of ideology but of optics. I remember Howard Dean losing the nomination on the optics of a scream that didn't really happen. Or Gary Hart dropping out after the photo of him with a woman not his wife on a boat.
Even the Bush/Cheney campaign colored within the lines. Their politics were wretched, but if Bush 2 had bragged about shooting someone on 5th Avenue, or grabbing them by the pussy, or made fun of a developmentally disabled person, he never would have been nominated, much less "elected".
The entire Trump phenomenon is an aberration. Why was he not forced out by the party mechanism before this nightmare even began?
I have a plan for November whether he is able to cheat his way in again or not. He is physically and mentally weak. Nature will take its course, and maybe before the election. But the damage he has done will outlive him and take a generation or two to repair.
I’m banking on Trump being completely demented by the time the election rolls around. Hopefully someone will notice.
Ye think??
I don’t think the GOP ever got over Barack Obama being elected POTUS in 2008. McConnell vowed to make Obama a one term president, which didn’t go as planned, much to his dismay ( is doing good things for the country such a bad thing?). Mitch had his moments in the sun, but look what that energy eventually unleashed: a major political party so hungry for power, so intent on idolatry, so dysfunctional they are now eating their own, and endorsing a madman as their favored candidate.
So true... MM excelled in perverse politics, and his success in getting the SC stacked may well get Dems into the White House again in 2024
Frank Loomer
,...and The Heritage Foundation and other right wing organizations, using various Christian organizations to push their agenda steadily for years.....painting themselves as "the good guys" when all along they were working to control and lead the Christian Right for the benefit of their far right agenda.
The 'dark side" has been pretending to be the "good guys"...now we are all experiencing the results of their hard , focused work to gain votes to succeed in pushing their agenda.
Agreed, i have subscribed "subversively" to THF, I can only shake my head when i scan it. Atavistic USA, all this nested inside the world's Superpower.
That was their chance to bring out the cretins that Buckley had rejected…
The Bush/Cheney mess was a step in this direction. I thought it was as low as repubs would go. Silly me. A half-black President, was just what the cretins needed to stir the pot and muddy the waters. And the vile, witches brew is what we got. We assumed that they still had a modicum of humanity. Well, they don’t…
Lee Atwater's admissions of his role in torpedoing Gary Hart, undid much of the trust I still had in my old party (basically tipped back towards the party when they forced Nixon to resign). It is hard to sort the real details of what went was going on as Hart and his wife were supposedly separated at the time, but what later set me against my old party was some of the senior players and fund raisers that bragged about how they had done it. The final straw, after a period of waiting to see if they would reject the disgusting Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz GoPac memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," was a well placed fund raiser asking/inviting a few of us to "fight dirtier than Democrats" (at a time when convictions of my old party's players seemed about 6 times that of the Democrats).
I left the old party the same year Elizabeth Warren did, for pretty much for similar reasons though mine included revelations from people I could never consider becoming as underhanded as. It's one thing to hear accusations from the opposition, but to basically get confirmation from within the ranks, as Cassidy Hutchinson is my heroic example of at a key place and time, clarifies the moral decisions that are so much easier to live with.
Sadly, thanks in some to large part the evangelicals, the "base" has "embraced the sinner"....
And I do believe bribery is a felony on both sides of the transaction…some of those oil execs might find it difficult to hold the public in thrall if they were the ones charged.
All the executive names and
Companies need to be named!!! Let the citizens of this country see and MAYBE understand why the prices at the pump are artificially high. It is the same reason prices at the grocery store are artificially inflated. Thanks to the wheeling and dealing and false promises made by a Life long con man.
Those execs should only be charged with bribery if they made a contribution to Trump as a direct result of that fundraiser. I suspect most will avoid Trump like the plague because he's bad for business. They might prefer the policies his controllers trick him to parrot, but they also need a stable society for their businesses to thrive. When society starts to fail, so does the oil business because demand for petroleum products drops.
Aww, who will go after that money…
This scheme with the oil industry - if it meets the definition of criminal bribery is it not obvious enough to merit swift legal action?
The number of crimes TFG has committed in plain sight is staggering and our system of law, which he disdains, along with his ill gotten billions, continue to protect him from consequences as he runs out the clock.
For anyone else, surely. For fpotus, it's just more of the same.
Amen!!!
Amen!!!
The Citizens United decision.
It is not just him. The republicans who knowingly and willfully say nothing or worse support his depravity are the real problem. Watching literally hundreds of members of Congress pander to a lunatic and deny their oaths of office is what no founder could have anticipated. We must recognize them and never vote for any of them. Many have said the truth and then waffle back to defending his nonsense . They are not patriots and in my view should be prosecuted. It would not hurt for the media to insist on an answer to what evidence there is to continue to suggest anything be a free and fair election.
I applaud your use of Stephanie Clifford's given name. A Daily Show comedian made the comment about how inappropriate it is to use her stage name repeatedly in the news. It labels her by her profession. The main stream media continues to call her Stormy Daniels and the trial, the hush money trial. She is Stephanie Clifford and the trial is related to election interference.
Agree, but interestingly when first sworn in to testify last week and asked which name she preferred to have used in the trial, she said Stormy Daniels.
Ellie Kona.
My opinion was that Stephanie was "acting as Stormy in her chosen professional role with DT".
I find nothing comical about her or her profession. She is honest as a human being in her chosen profession. In my opinion, there is no more to be said.
She has a family as well.
I think it was a form of reclaiming identity, the way the word “queer” has been reclaimed as affirmative.
L
Ellie, no small part of what makes her, Stormy or Stephanie, so admirable is the self-confidence with which she says her truth. She is a woman who KNOWS she's good and what she's good at and takes pride in how she does what she's good at.
Oh! Free marketing? Or a hope of some personal protection.
The cowboy (in myths) was to protect the good guys from the bad guys. Imagine Sheriff Wyatt Earp telling the townspeople that he was going to open the safe for the bank robbers if they made sure that he was reelected sheriff—he’d have been run out of town. This quid pro quo is precisely what 45 attempted to do with Ukraine—and he’s promised to hold up funding passed by Congress if he chooses.
Biden has made sure that all states are treated equally regardless of whether their citizens voted for him; don’t expect that if 45 gets reelected.
Land baron mentality usurping the cowboy mythology!
Janet, so true!
As many have observed, for Trump, all of life is transactional. What a pathetic, soulless philosophy!
The Earps fought the Clantons over who was going to run the vice in Tombstone.
TC, just goes to show that, once again, the TV depiction of a criminal politician does not match the reality.
TY HCR. I would love to know which oil/gas firms met with T at Mar Lago.
EGDx2, I'm working from memory of the WAPO article but, the piece included a number of Oil CEO's including but, not limited to Dan Eberhart, Oil Billionaire, Harold Hamm, &Jack Fusco CEO of Cheniere Energy of the now important LNG industry.
The article caught my eye because of the involvement of Republican, North Dakota Governor, DOUG BURGUM who has Oil Donor corrections & is mentioned as a potential VP Candidate given the South Dakota Governor's escalating debacle.
Hey, Bryan and EGDx2: Here is a quote from the article I believe you are thinking of, Bryan.
"The roughly two dozen executives invited included Mike Sabel, the CEO and founder of Venture Global, and Jack Fusco, the CEO of Cheniere Energy, whose proposed projects would directly benefit from lifting the pause on new LNG exports. Other attendees came from companies including Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, according to an attendance list obtained by The Post."
Here's the full article, gifted:
https://wapo.st/3JVEqcz
Thanks for the link, Lynell. Oh, and good morning!!
Good afternoon Ally-
Rachel Maddow's book, "Blowout" has a nice history of the fossil fuel industry in the US. She goes into quite a bit of detail on Harold Hamm and what a scumbag he is. Trump met with him several times when he was President.
So many scumbag oilmen, like cowboys with lots of money.
They have figured out how to steal what I feel are our natural resources and get rich over them. The section on what the oilmen did in OK to screw the people out of taxes on the oil is sickening.
I have read "Blowout" and agree 100%
Morning, Ally!
While trying not to be exhausted over it all, Bob Lewis - one of our readers/commenters on LFAA - has kept me going, when he commented,
"If we give up, if we cease voting, we hand our power over to those who haven’t given up. I simply can’t abide that."
Exactly so, Lynell. I am NOT going to go without a fight, and there is no way I will relinquish what power I still have.
Bingo ...danka Lynell.
Russian related oil firms. Oil firms are all connected. Price fixing etc.
If you want a fascinating read, get ahold of Rachel Maddow's "Blowout".
I keep up with her . Haven't read any of her books. I know I'll be terrorized. She speaks the hard truths.
She does, and she writes well. "Blowout" explains a LOT of fpotus's cabinet appointees.
Will get it. Thanks.
I totally agree with Ally. Good read. She is an amazing journalist.
OMG, I just saw this comment. I recommended it to you above. Oops.
Loved that book. I really need to go back and read it again.
Reminds me of what started my wondering about the most public revaluation of a Mafia Summit describes in an article at https://www.greaterowego.com/communitypress/1997/11-97/MAFIA.htm
It became too hard to ignore organized crime after the chance interruption and rather comedic flight through the woods of the participants after they spotted the police setting up a road block but letting the first car through after a brief stop to record the License plate data. Apparently they didn't have everything in place yet, but did have another road block being set up further down the road that would take firmer action. The others, seeing the car allowed through, started heading out in a line of cars but were stopped, causing them to try to get away on foot through the woods. An estimated 50 were not caught but 63 were.
I wonder what the cameras at Mar-A-Lago would show of the potential bribery donors .
HCR cites the fundamental determinant of Republican politics: “The American cowboy burst back into prominence with the advent of the Marlboro Man in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision”. That’s when the white working class degenerated into a mob that would do anything, including, we see now, trade democracy for autocracy, in a desparate attempt to preserve their systemic advantages over black people. Eventually, they sabotaged their only real economic power, labor unions, to join their cowboy hero, Reagan, on a trickle-down trip to oblivion.
I have to disagree that cowboy culture re-entered American life with the Marlboro Man. Cowboy films and radio programs were exceptionally popular all through the 30s and onward. As a child, my main fantasy figure was a cowboy!
Annie, I often wonder if all those western cowboy shows on TV (beginning, for me, with our first TV set in the early 1950s) with their ubiquitous pistols, and rifles, and gun fights, may be part of the root cause of America's apparent infatuation with guns. Us kids absorbed a whole lotta fantasy gun-play growing up here in America.
Wearing black hats or white?
The way I remember it, everyone was practicing "open carry" with a six-shooter in a holster, with a belt that held ammo in appropriately-sized loops. And the "good guys" wore white hats, and the "bad guys" wore black hats. Zorro and the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Gene Autry sang. The good guys always had to win in the end.
Ooh, you could always tell Hoppy in a crowd because of the white hat. But Roy Rogers sang too, smiled a lot, rode a palomino, and said "Dig dirt, Trigger..." And the episode always ended with the hero falling off a cliff. Or hanging on to one. And then, thrill on thrill, there was "The Oregon Trail" with its ever-lengthening synopsis. I thought for a long time that the "Light Cavalry" overture had been composed just for the opening titles.
LCO is one of my favorites; I arranged it for the tuba ensemble some years back. It is an amazing piece.
We were watching the same shows in Canada, and …..
As a child, I used to put up my tepee in the garden and dress up in my long feathered headdress. That was in inner-suburban Melbourne.
"With his cowboy hat and western ranch, Reagan deliberately tapped into this mythology, as well as the racism and sexism in it, when he promised to slash taxes and regulations to free individuals from a grasping government. He promised that cutting taxes and regulations would expand the economy. As wealthy people—the “supply side” of the economy– regained control of their capital, they would invest in their businesses and provide more jobs. Everyone would make more money."
Except they did not "invest in their businesses". They use the earnings to do 'stock buybacks' to increase the value of their stock options and become even richer. washing and repeating.
Posted by Heather Cox Richardson | Jan 31, 2021
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/heather-richardson/cowboy-mythology-twenty-years-since-reagan-revolution-rise-movement-conservatives/
Call me crazy but bribery is illegal and Trump just promised to change the rules if he receives a giant donation from the oil industry. Will this nightmare ever end? Thanks, Heather!
These days it seems with the current makeup of the Supreme (Joke) Court, anything is possible!
I saw an article yesterday that agrees with your bribery theory.
And his many good points? Devotion to evil? Addiction to Philandering? His bleaching hairdresser? His red faced cosmetician? Hiding all his college transcripts? Draft dodging? Lying about applying to many colleges? Failure in multiple marriages over decades? His blasphemy? Lying to the press? His lawyers? Read the papers that were supported by cabinet colleagues. His disrespect for the honest? Racism? Fascism? Pathological dishonesty and lying? Xenophobia? Bankruptcy addiction? Banning Abortion? Collaboration and admiration for vicious dictators? Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Mr. Kim of N. Korea? China’s top thug?
He’s hated and feared by members of his own party, by his vice president, by his cabinet, by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the military and by 90% of the mainstream press.
I consider the “fear” reference here is really cowardice.
His failure in every business and even in management of his charities …
And hiding his high school transcript from a military academy?
And yet he continues to get away with all of it, the illegal and the barely legal, supported by various ass-kissing (or plain cowardly) Republican members of Congress, Supreme Court judges, et al. It's tiring.
Indeed. The Grand Old Party of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Dwight David Eisenhower, our greatest, is worshipping a draft dodger, a lying racist fascist criminal that rapes, marries three times, sleeps with porn stars, loves dictators, called Covid-19 a hoax, cheats his contractors, is a pathological liar, hides his transcripts and threatens to kill his opponents.
Wow…just wow! What an, even more, “eye-opening” letter. Thank you!
Thank you, as always, for providing both background and context to the ongoing corruption and chicanery that are being perpetrated upon our citizens and our nation. The pieces of the puzzle continue to fall into place, but many of us wouldn’t see the larger picture without your expertise as a historian and scholar.
“Finally there was the eye-popping story broken by Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow in the Washington Post on Thursday, revealing that last month, at a private meeting with about two dozen top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, Trump offered to reverse President Joe Biden’s environmental rules designed to combat climate change and to stop any new ones from being enacted in exchange for a $1 billion donation.”
Trump’s timing couldn’t have been worse:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused
I’ll have to find the article (Bulwark, maybe) warning that the “October surprise” we’ve all come to expect will be a massive rise in fuel prices. Which of course only Orange man can fix. Buckle up.
I've seen that theory tossed around in a number of different places.
The manipulation could be/is astounding.
Wow, just wow! Once again you’ve ‘splained the events and made them so understandable that even I can talk coherently, thank you!!
Professor Richardson. Keep these coming. Real cowboys will sooner or later understand that Donald Trump doesn’t even know how to fire a pea shooter. The biggest fake city dude in history. He’s nobody’s pardner.
Well he is a horse’s A$$
👏
😂
Happy Valley, eh? I used to live north of there. In the woods.
All hat and no cattle…of course too many ‘cowboys’ look like the Bundys and their bizarre tribe of radical moronic version of Mormon. Of course Donny would not last a day on a horse.
Ha! He couldn't even get on a horse w/o the use of a crane. And pity the poor horse subjected to that weight.
The Un-Marlboro Man
Seeing the mythology of American toxic masculinity laid out like this makes me hopeful a new chapter is upon us.