A handy little video from MoveOn that I thought I’d share. I’d encourage you all to share it as well.
I wish, though, that MoveOn had dealt with Trump’s later, ahem, disavowal of Duke, which was less a principled rejection of everything Duke stands for than the petulant whining of an overgrown manchild offering a half-hearted faux-apology that he doesn’t really mean — “ok, I’m soooooooory I hit my sister but she called me a fascist.”
Here’s his “disavowal,” which he gave on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years. I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK.Ā Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now.
One person who doesn’t believe that Trump has truly “disavowed” David Duke is … David Duke.
https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/756334475223638016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This is an interesting article. Although now I’m used to Laurie Penny’s wonderful use of language it seems a bit bland. Still, it’s content that counts I suppose (although would it have killed him to stick a muppet murder reference in there?)
http://qz.com/644985/privilege-is-what-allows-sanders-supporters-to-say-theyll-never-vote-for-clinton/?utm_source=qzfbarchive
Written by Melissa Hillman. Although I agree the muppet murder thing is a good idea. (#MuppetLivesMatter? Anyone?)
Missed my window to edit. Just wanted to mention I didn’t mean to devalue BlackLivesMatter with my Muppet joke. Sorry if it comes across that way.
@ violinless
Oops, I’ll just pretend I got confused because she has ‘man’ in her name.
(Actually I though it was by someone else but now I realise that was just the person who posted the link to Facebook)
Putin hacked into the DNC too?
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/25/exclusive_wikileaks_julian_assange_on_releasing
Am I alone in not getting what the scandal is? The DNC’s job is to get Democratic candidates elected. They’re not required to be neutral.
I think maybe people don’t understand what the primary and delegate selection process is. The party can nominate its presidential candidate any way it wants. They used to have no election and the candidates were selected at the convention by the delegates. Somewhere along the line, they decided to give the public a say and hold primaries and caucuses and the results tie into the pledged delegates that go to the convention. If the DNC wanted to change the rules and pick candidates entirely internally again, they could.
I think people think that presidential primaries are like regular elections and the DNC and RNC are sort of like state Secretary of State offices? As we’ve discussed here before, a lot of the Bernie or bust people have never been involved with the party before, have no idea how it works and didn’t bother to research how it works. That’s not Hillary Clinton’s fault.
I’m not saying the process is perfect, but it’s not going to change overnight because a few new people joined and want a non-establishment candidate to win. The process is set up beforehand by the party members who voted for it and changing it means getting involved in the party permanently. Not just come in and tell it what to do every four years.
Sorry for the rant. Especially since I’m probably not saying anything most people here don’t already know.
@WWTH : I agree with your rant. In addition to that, thoses emails mostly show that the DNC have some influence but don’t step out of his role to unlawfully bar someone from trying.
I love Bernie, I don’t like all his supporter, far from it.
Missed Trump’s latest David Duke related fuckery. Said he’d be open to voting for a democrat over Duke, but it’d depend on the democrat.
Definitely the latter is worse. They made a choice to be that way and are more likely to be inflammatory in spreading the crap. Intent may not be magic but it still matters.
That’s the problem though. He doesn’t have to convince anyone of anything. He’s such a sensationalist success thanks to his ancestors business and his own pathological lying spree that all he has to do is exist and people will follow him to hell.
And there’s proof of that. Many of his followers don’t even know what the emancipation proclamation was. Nor do they understand why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan happened. They’re also perfectly okay with torture and war crimes simply because Trump said it’s a good idea and have no clue about the history of use of such crimes or the moral and ethical dilemmas, much less the lack of effectiveness of such methods.
Then you go and look at stuff like Trump Magazine, Trump World Magazine, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Tower Orlando, Trump Tower Toronto, Trump Airlines, Donald Trump: The Game, Trump Casinos, Go Trump dot com, and Trump Casino, all of which either never got off the ground or failed within months of startup, yet got literally thousands of people interested and heavily invested simply because Trumps name was on it.
Trumps very name causes people to turn into mindless idiots instantly. They’re willing to follow him to the ends of the earth just because he said they should.
Trump doesn’t need to make people think anyone is out to get them. They’ll follow him just because his last name is Trump.
Just thought I’d put this here:
http://www.advocate.com/comedy/2016/7/23/when-exactly-was-america-great
Tim Wise has been saying this for a while. That the ultimate year such people would like to turn the clock back to is 1957. Is anybody noticing a trend in these dates?
@ WWTH : Regarding the DNC emails, I don’t like the idea of using a candidate’s religious beliefs against them, as was discussed in one of the email messages, but otherwise I agree with your rant. Any U.S. citizen who is 35 or older and isn’t a convicted felon has the right to run for president, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has the right to insist on representing a specific party. Bernie Sanders was an independent for years — why would he suddenly be entitled to the support of the Democratic party if the party leaders thought he wouldn’t support their agenda? Couldn’t the Republicans have said last summer that they wouldn’t nominate Donald Trump because of his hateful comments and lack of experience?
@ lunzie
I bet a few candidates over the years have been glad about that ‘convicted’.
Not related to the topic but I felt the need to share: an Australian Facebook group has just been shut down after it was revealed that its members were sharing and celebrating stories of rape, domestic violence, revenge porn, and all the other horrible shit you’d expect. Naturally, members are claiming that the posts were taken out of context and it was all just “a bit of a laugh”.
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/i-gangbanged-her-she-cried-i-won/news-story/b98621c02c64a7e0514de80b3e12d45c
@Lunzie
Honestly, if that hadn’t have been discussed, I’da been worried. It’s like, if it turned out Obama never discussed nuking Iraq. Don’t do that, obvs. But ya gotta think about it, before ya reject it. If the DNC really thought that Sanders was a disaster candidate destined to lose, they needed to ask themselves how far they’re willing to go to make sure their choice won. I’m super glad they didn’t go there, but them talking about it, as hideous as it sounds, kinda means the system works. And it means they might be just ruthless enough to use everything they have against Trump if need be. I find that bitterly comforting
@Alan
1 of em’s the current Republican nominee š
@Inkswitch
Welp… goddammit… Good on Facebook, I suppose?
Trump Jr. went on TV and said that if his father questioned someone’s religion there would be a massive backlash against him.
Irony is dead.
@Alan: as a former convicted felon (covered by Carter’s blanket pardon), I resemble that remark.
@Lunzie: There is a real problem here. I am an agnostic, but I believe that at the present time it is almost impossible for an avowed atheist or agnostic to get elected to anything in the US, let alone President. It’s wrong but you have to deal with it. If Sanders had been nominated, you would have heard him labeled a “godless socialist” and probably even a “godless Communist” hundreds of times a day.
@WWTH: Technically speaking, members of the DNC are not supposed to publicly endorse any candidate in a primary, but they are allowed to have their opinions and discuss them internally. There never was any doubt that DWS and the DNC did not want Bernie to get the nomination — part of their job is to keep the party from nominating an unelectable candidate, and obviously they did a much better job than the RNC.
Since political parties are not provided for in the Constitution (and Washington in particular hated the idea), they are to some extent neither fish nor fowl. Technically, they are private organizations that are legally permitted to choose their own candidates for whatever reasons seem good to them, but there has been a growing sentiment that they should be more democratic. But how? It’s a very complex issue that political scientist have been arguing about for decades. A common suggestion is to have national primary(s) possibly on a regional basis. But in the first place, you have the question of who should be allowed to vote in a party primary. Should Democrats, for example, be allowed to have a say in who the Republican candidate should be? How do you handle undeclared voters, who are often not really independent? And then, a national primary would probably be hideously expensive, eliminating candidates who don’t have huge financial backing and vastly increasing the power of money. It is easy to point out the flaws in the current system — the people don’t necessarily get to choose the candidates from which they choose the President. My home state of NH is not really representative of the country — far too white — but it is small, which means a candidate who has limited money but is willing to get out and meet people and try to convince them in person, has a chance. But it is difficult to devise any other system that would not also have huge flaws — and then you’d have to convince the states to accept it.
Regarding Trump, it is clear that his negatives are so high that his only option is to try to drive Hillary’s negatives higher. In particular, I don’t see any way that he doesn’t lose women’s votes by a fatal margin. So, in desperation, he’s going back to the Nixon-Bush playbook that has served well in the past — the “safe streets”/”law and order” Nixon campaign, the “Democrats are soft on terrorists” Bush campaign of 2004. History suggests that women will vote for a terrible misogynist if they think he will keep their children safe. So he’s trying to foster the image of a nation in flames, which only he can fix, and very quickly at that. I think Hillary needs to counter this by exuding calm optimism and contrasting her experience and discipline to Trump’s wild fear-mongering. (I believe that the pro-Bernie demonstrations have been augmented by the Republicans and the contrived flap over the DNC emails timed to try to make it look like the Democratic Party is in disarray and Hillary is not in control, in order to damage her image as the person who can run things well.)
… Did Trump Jr miss the part where Daddy Dumbest was the world’s most prominent birther for years?
@ GOSJM
Shortly after the Palestinan election I had an encounter with some chaps from Hamas. This was of course just after Hamas had been elected. These guys were former Fatah but they’d switched sides for various mutually beneficial reasons. They were western educated and highly secular. We got taking about how Hamas had been elected with such a strong support for women (they were as surprised as anyone about that).
It transpired that it was down to corruption. Women were willing to sacrifice a few freedoms in exchange for candidates who wouldn’t just embezzle the treasury. Feeding their kids was more important to them than wearing a headscarf. For all Hamas’s faults when it came to women, the women thought they offered a better deal for their children.
Well, I’ve been poking around on the internet and I think part of what I said in my earlier post is incorrect. The U. S. Constitution says that to serve as president, a person must be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident for 14 years. There is no mention of being ineligible due to criminal convictions.
Eugene V. Debs and Lyndon LaRouche both ran for president while in prison, although neither one had a realistic chance of being elected.
The Wikipedia article about LaRouche’s campaign had some interesting information about how he wanted to run for the Democratic nomination in 1996, but the head of the DNC said he wasn’t to be considered as a qualified candidate because of his beliefs and past actions. When LaRouche received enough votes to get delegates in Virginia and Louisiana, the Democratic party refused to award him the delegates. LaRouche sued but lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche_U.S._presidential_campaigns
It seems to me that the Republicans could have prevented Trump from becoming their nominee if they had chosen to do so. They didn’t, which tells me a lot about the priorities of the GOP.
There was an interesting article in the Guardian about the DNC emails and why they weren’t actually doing anything wrong: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/25/dnc-email-leak-bernie-barely-democrat
Don’t mind me, just leaving a question here for any future trolls (because there will be trolls):
You guys all hate Communists, right? Spent the last eight years screaming about SEEKRIT COMMIES, accusing everyone from the President to us of being KGB spies, seeing Stalin in your soup, throwing around “Cultural Marxism” like it’s an actual thing?
… How do you square that away with the ever-increasing likelihood that your TrumpenfĆ¼hrer has been working with and may even owe money to Putin, the on-off Communist, ex-KGB spy, Stalin fanboy and detester of American culture? Doesn’t the cognitive dissonance give you a headache? It’d sure as shit give me a headache…
And no, “SHILLARY BENGHAZI EMAILS BLOWJOB” is not an answer. This isn’t rhetorical or a gotcha, I honestly want to know.
It’d be ironic if a convicted felon could not vote, but could become President.
@SFHC
It’s like how Ulfric Stormcloak was at one point a Thamor agent!
Anyway, I thought they loved Putin for being so manly.
@ proudfootz
We’ve had serving prisoners (who can’t vote) elected as MPs.
And until the franchise for women was extended generally women under 25 could stand for parliament but not vote.