Earlier this week we saw what can happen when a bunch of pissed-off voters call their elected representatives to explain what’s pissing them off: Congressional Republicans dropped a ridiculous plan to gut the congressional ethics office.
Trouble is, making these kinds of calls can be very difficult for those dealing with social anxiety. Writing your representatives a personalized email (not a form letter) can also be quite effective.
But if you want to get past the fear and actually make the calls, cartoonist Cordelia McGee-Tubb (who suffers from social anxiety herself) has some good advice, in the form of a comic.
You can find it, along with some other useful links, on her blog Echo Through the Fog.
See more Resist Trump Today posts here.
I found this article rather interesting.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/rural-america-understanding-isnt-problem
Like many others here, I’ve always thought of Trump as a bumbling con-man and blowhard, but obviously I seriously underestimated his con-man skills — he may in fact be the greatest con-man ever. The sort of people who are impressed by the glitz of Las Vegas truly believe his carefully nurtured myth of being a mega-successful businessman who can do all sorts of things that legions of worthless bureaucrats haven’t been able to do. I believe that he may in fact have negative net worth, and it is entirely possible that he owes so much to Russian kleptocrats that he is in fact Putin’s vassal. But many people mistake glitter for gold. Maybe we should call Trump the Pyrite President. It’s very frustrating that so many USians are so easily fooled.
Two things elected Trump IMO. First, the large and weak field of candidates for the Republican nomination. He is a con-man but he was also the only charismatic person in a field of drones (not the military type, of course). A lot of Republicans didn’t like or trust him, but Republicans are trained to get in line behind their candidate, and they did.
Second, the vicious smear campaign against Hillary succeeded. It probably wouldn’t have except for Bernie Saunders acting as an amplifier and convincing a lot of people that things like universal health care were possible NOW and Hillary was a Wall St. shill for not supporting it. (They might have been possible in a decade or so if the millennials really organized a coherent movement to steadily take over the government over time. For instance, with health care, expanding Medicare slowly but surely to cover everyone. But now it is likely that Medicare will suffer a possibly lethal blow, and the millennials will spend their lives trying to get back to where we are now.) Then the Russians started slowly releasing the hacked emails, trying to reinforce the myth that Bernie got robbed of the nomination and would have been a stronger candidate. Combined with the fact that everybody was talking about a Hillary landslide, people lost sight of what a catastrophe a Republican President would be. Unfortunately, the people of color who did come out and vote for Hillary will be the big losers.
I think it’s very likely that the Trump administration will be a giant clusterfuck, where ordinary people will lose big and Trump and pals will get rich or richer — basically everyone who has ever played ball with Trump has lost. Trump is in way over his head, and unlike George W. Bush (who I believe knew he wasn’t up to it but foolishly trusted Cheney and Co. to pull him through), I don’t think anyone will be able to control Trump enough to make him even marginally competent. Bad things are going to happen; I’m just hoping that there’s enough momentum in our system to keep him from doing the worst things. It looks like Obamacare might survive. It doesn’t look like he’ll be able to tear up the Iran nuke deal and start a war with Iran. Trump can probably cut petrodeals with the Russian kleptocrats and make lots of money, but I don’t think he can allow Putin to expand from the status quo in Ukraine or the Baltics — there are enough Republican hawks in the Senate who couldn’t swallow that to join with the Democrats. The worst things I see actually happening are (1) an increase of support for fossil fuels, but I think I think that green energy is too far along now to do more than slightly impede its progress, and I think China is ready and willing to take over leadership in this field and reap the enormous profits it will produce; (2) he will move the US embassy to Jerusalem and allow Israel to annex most or all of the West Bank, which will be terrible for both Israelis and Palestinians.