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By David Futrelle
A little musical open thread to discuss the amazing news! No Trump fans, trolls, or Don Jr sockpuppets allowed.
You might have to turn up the volume on this one:
Very little is being done to address Russian hacking, gerrymandering, voter suppression, fake news, and dark money. Until that happens, I’m not confident the Democrats can retake the House in 2018, even if there’s a blue tsunami of outrage. The Senate will be even more of an uphill battle. Democrats are on defense next year. Until we fix our elections, overturn Citizens United, and reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, this problem is going to continue.
Essentially, Russia exploited backdoor vulnerabilities in the US electoral system, and installed a malicious piece of ransomware named Donald Trump. If we don’t give him and his wealthy pals tax breaks, he’ll erase the Constitution.
I thought there was quite a bit moving on gerrymandering, at least more than I’ve seen before, with SCOTUS supposed to weigh in on it, and WI taking the lead in challenging it.
Same with voter suppression, Drumpf’s bullshit Voter Fraud Commission being told basically to fuck off by most of the states.
Citizens United, Russian hacking, further voter suppression are all things that have to be addressed, but I don’t know for sure that we’re completely down and out unless all those things happen by midterm (spoiler alert: they won’t).
So, I don’t think NOTHING is happening, I just can’t get emotionally invested in it in a positive way.
@ Alan;
… I’ll have to see THAT….
Citizens United is one of the worst things to happen to American politics in a long time. It was a “money greatly influences” game before (except for Perot), but now it really is “corporations and ‘American’ oligarchs greatly influence”.
I doubt the results will come out before midterm election as well. I’ll still vote against Republicans, unless they vote to impeach Trump before then (won’t happen).
You do know that the next Brongbart headline will be something like “Trump Jr posts emails, exonerates self from collusion”
ETA: BB’s latest: “President on Don Jr. ‘Russia Email’ Release: ‘I Applaud His Transparency’” Close enough
Does that mean his motives are transparent, or you can see right through the lies…?
http://i.imgur.com/1kEz1Iu.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IS83rAi.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/WD6KYoL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hLw0rQT.jpg
(Well, not my memes so much as memes I’ve nicked from Twitter, but hey.)
Oh, no worries, darling dreemr. I am the exact same way.
I’m with you; so much has been given a pass that I have zero confidence in our elected officials anymore, and I’m going to try my hardest not to expend to much energy worrying about things that are completely beyond my control.
I make my calls, do what I can, will vote where I can, will protest when I can, but I have to keep myself emotionally closed somewhat.
Edit: I saw the Hillary book one, and I laughed so hard water came out of my nose. Love it.
The people I know who support Trump enthusiastically wouldn’t care if it turned out he was wiring money to ISIS to increase anxiety about terrorism and give him a better chance of getting elected. They’ve already made a conscious decision that they simply don’t care about the moral calculus of any of the issues as long as they personally benefit from tax cuts.
You see similar ways of thinking among domestic violence offenders and members of Nazi and KKK groups. A few Nazi groups went from supporting al-Qaeda to opposing it based solely on a body count of people they dislike.
Or they’re just that racist. Many Republicans of my acquaintance aren’t deluded: they know they won’t see much of anything from Republican tax cuts. But they’re okay with that as long as black people are punished for being black.
Worst. Olympic. Event. Ever.
There’s a blogger named Lysander who claims to know Roosh and whose primary focus on his blog is promoting pederasty. It’s rather interesting that Roosh bans gay men from posting on his websites, but seems perfectly okay with having pederast friends….
Betsy DeVos meets with ‘men’s rights’ activists
DeVos plans to meet with groups that dismiss domestic violence and rape allegations.
jesus motherfucking christ
@LindsayIrene
QFFT
@LindsayIrene, Rioting Werebonobo
They’re really mainlining the hate from the tap.
Re: DeVos
Yep, even with congress all jammed up the Trump admin is still out there every day doing harm.
I am reminded daily of what Tre Crowder said, concerning the butt hurt of the Bernie Bros*, June 3, 2016:
*In the interest of full disclosure, I voted for Sanders in the primary. And then I fucking voted for Clinton in the election. Where the fuck were you?
ETA: That last question was purely rhetorical unless you didn’t vote for Clinton.
@SFHC – bless you for those memes, a much-needed smile.
@PeeVee – I’m doing the same, and on days when I have more spoons I work harder to encourage others and keep morale up and get out the vote. And on days I don’t, I seem to come here and whine about it 🙂
ETA: I may have to head to my basement in a bit – a pretty severe tornado warning in my area with high winds. We’ll be fine where we are but there will at least be a terrific storm, and my dog gets a lil’ nervous.
I wanna move to the universe where Hillary is POTUS.
May I accompany you?
I wanted to find more Hillary memes to join in, but then I google imagesearched for Hillary memes and then I got very, very sad. Humans are so terrible :C
I still can’t believe the enstupidation. Trump would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for his meddling kid.
@dreemr – The few lawsuits are encouraging, but I wouldn’t count on much of anything being fixed by 2018. Dems are sailing into the wind. You can’t redistrict if you don’t even have a seat at the table – plus the US Census Director recently resigned, and the agency is underfunded, which means likely Dem voters in poorer districts will be undercounted in 2020. It’ll take a huge wave, on the order of +10-15, to overcome all the GOP shenanigans and have a shot at righting the ship.
Just like their manosphere counterparts, Republicans have to trick and lie and steal their way into the power that they claim is “naturally” and “rightfully” theirs. Uh huh.
Hope the storm isn’t too bad!
What the shuddering fuck???
My (very tentative) guess is that DeVos will promote sexual assault policies based on “miscommunication theory,” which is what most college administrators relied on in making sanctioning decisions before the Dear Colleague Letter.
Trigger Warning: Victim-blaming bullshit
The main ideas behind miscommunication theory are based on the work of linguist Deborah Tannen, who claimed that men and women have distinctive and biologically innate communication styles. The TL;DR version is that women frequently behave in ways that men incorrectly interpret as consenting to sex, even (allegedly) interpreting a nonverbal “no” as a “yes” or a “maybe.” Then, supposedly, if the guy is a little drunk it’s even less likely he interpreted the nonverbal cues. So either the panel can dismiss the case as “he said, she said” since each person has his or her own “truth,” or find the guy responsible but make an absurdly lenient sanctioning decision based on “context” (like a “suspension” that’s suspended until he graduates, so basically no punishment).
So yeah, basically a snake oil sophisticated-sounding version of “she was asking for it,” complete with bigoted assumptions.
The problem is that this way of looking at the situation is simply false. What’s going on is that people in male-exclusive spaces like fraternities think it’s acceptable to target a specific person to try to have sex with (without considering whether she wants sex or not), and think it’s okay to use alcohol or drugs to make someone more “pliable.” They’re aware that they’re being predatory, but it’s easy to portray targeting someone for sex as “tradition,” and using alcohol or drugs makes it easier to portray the assault as regretted drunk sex or a miscommunication.
and the in-fighting and leaks from Trump’s inner circle continue. Trump Sr.’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz is out of favor and may resign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/russia-trump.html
Me too.
OT, but the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee has announced the surname of their current batch of kittens. Alexander. First name naming rights auction have started.
This is Angel. She’ll be up for adoption once she finishes healing from some surgeries.
Hahahah it’s great watching you losers get your hopes up over yet another FAKE NEWS nothing burger. Keep going, it’ll make reading this blog all the more satisfying when the Dems are completely wiped out in 2018 and TRVMP is re-elected in an even bigger landslide in 2020 😀
motherfucker please.