That day is, of course, is when the 538 electors will cast their votes for a new POTUS. Folks from both sides of the duopoly are urging: #StopTrump. The Green Stein? Well, never mind; for her, it’s “about our democracy”.
The change.org petition to the Electors to change their votes to Clinton.
“We are calling on “Conscientious Electors” to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump, and to support the national popular vote winner.
Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.”, etc.
As of this morning, the petition has 4,806,281 supporters with a goal of 6,000,000. Now as far as I can discover, 12,836869 votes were cast in the recent election, and it’s assumed that all of voters voted in the presidential ‘contest’. Now whether or not the organizers check for ringers signing is anyone’s guess. It’s a strange NGO, imo, including rather hidden funding sources, but philanthropy.com was breathless about Pierre Omidyar’s having given them $15 million in 2013 ‘with no strings’. (It seems to be a for-profit comodifying looks and emails organization, and has gone through a few crises and rebrandings, who knows how it sits now?)
Additionally, there’s a ‘Stay Home on the 16th to #StopTrump’, no work, no school, no shopping:
“Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers #68 explained that he saw the role of the Electoral College as one that would protect the people against a dangerous demagogue. If millions of people participate, it will create a much stronger argument for the electors to go faithless.”
And from HamiltonElectors.com: “The Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to stop an unfit man from becoming President. The Constitution they crafted gives us this tool. Conscience demands that we use it. Electors are pledging to put America first and vote for a qualified Republican alternative who can unify our country. These brave Electors need our support.”
Note: as per da Wiki, Clinton has garnered roughly 48% of the votes to Trump’s 46%. The ‘projected’ electoral count is The ‘projected’ electoral count is Trump 306, Clinton 232.
Now Lawrence Lessig, the (IMO) absurdist Prez candidate (“Fix Campaign Finance, And Resign”) was on Democracy Now recently, touting the ‘The Electoral College Is Constitutionally Allowed to Choose Clinton over Trump’ drumbeats.
(the transcript). Amy inked to an earlier opinion piece at the WaPo urging the same thing.
“Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, ‘a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice’—and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about ‘winner take all.’ It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom—about whether to overrule ‘the people’ or not—was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.”
At DN!: LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, as I—as you described in summarizing the op-ed, the framers meant for the electors to exercise judgment. And it’s a judgment which is really asking the question: Should we overrule what the people have done? Now, there are some cases where I think they plainly should overrule what the people have done. For example, if a candidate is a crazy person or if it turns out not to be qualified or is a criminal, those would be good reasons to overrule what the people have done. But in this case, there’s no reason for the electors to overrule the popular choice. The popular choice, by more than 2 million votes, is a completely qualified candidate for president. And the principle, that should be a fundamental principle in our democracy, the principle of “one person, one vote,” says that the vote of every American should count equally. And if it does, Hillary Clinton should be the president of the United States.”
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lessig, your column prompted a number of rebuttals. One was that electors are simply unvetted party loyalists who are ill-equipped to make the independent—to make independent judgments. Your response?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, it’s true we don’t know who they are. But I’m not asking them to make a judgment based on their own preferences. I’m asking them to recognize a principle that should be common to all of us. And that principle is the principle of equality. Now, if it turned out that the candidate was insane or the candidate was a criminal, we’d also be calling on them, these people we don’t know, to make a judgment, as the framers of the Constitution expected they would, not to ratify the choice of the people for that candidate. So, the Electoral College is a project that calls on their judgment. If we don’t like it, we can talk about how to eliminate it. I’m not quite convinced we should eliminate it completely. I think it’s important to have a final check be somebody other than the Supreme Court. But given that it’s there, we should take it seriously. And taking it seriously says they should exercise their judgment according to the moral values, the principles that are part of our constitutional tradition today. And those principles say equality.”
Lessig has allied with the law firm Durie Tangri that will advise electors; HuffPo:
“A new organization is offering pro bono legal assistance to any Electoral College member who decides to break with the will of the people in his or her state, in hopes of derailing President-elect Donald Trump before he is sworn in.”
I did get a good chuckle out of this title at Slate: “The Faith of the Faithless Electors; Will enough of them go rogue to stop Donald Trump? Probably not. But the effort alone gives you hope.’; Michelle Goldberg
And of course adding epic fuel to the fire are PropOrNot (here is the WaPo’s ludirously weak-sauce defense to Timberg’s original McCarthyist rant):
“Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.”
The currently deposed Red Queen is all over the MSM decrying #FakeNews, Obama has ordered a full review of the ‘possible’ Russian hacking of the US election, and Jill Stein’s recount petition has asserted ‘foreign agents’ interfered with the election. The Twittersphere is still raging with anti-Trump polemics akin to this:
William Bonzai had a bit of fun with the WaPo, PropOrNot and Clinton’s protestations.
But seriously: just imagine if when the electors’ votes are tabulated on Jan. 20…and Clinton gets crowned Queen of the USA, what might or would ensue? It’s not hard to imagine blood in the streets, isn’t it? What do you think about these schemes?
In her ‘Black Fear in the Age of Trump’, Margaret Kimberly writes:
“Every move Trump makes is followed like a sign of Armageddon. Announcements of his appointments and his bizarre ranting tweets are followed with obsessive fixation like watching a monster movie meant to create terror.”
Her prescription in a nutshell:
“If Trumpism is to be destroyed it cannot be through the same measures that brought us to this ignominious political end. It also can’t be done with the same faces who brought us here or with bought off progressives. Al Gore and Tulsi Gabbard may stop by to kiss Donald’s ring but that doesn’t mean we must either “give him a chance” or believe the end is nigh.
The desire for self-determination brought people out of slavery and out of Jim Crow segregation. It can certainly save us from the alt-right, Donald Trump and an attorney general named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. We survived the Confederates and we can survive anyone named after them. That will mean shaking off fear, the Democrats, and the black misleaders all at once. We have never had anyone to depend on except ourselves. We do best when we acknowledge and honor that fact.”
Glen Ford adds: ‘Fascism with a Democratic Party Face’, and links to Ms. Kimberly’s ‘Who’s the fascist?’ essay from May.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
As a conscientious former federal public servant, I can attest that Queen HELL IS completely, Unqualified CRIMINAL. With the Clinton$tein Monster (It’s A BRIBE!) RESURRECTION and luminaries like Lessig having lost their minds, the left is self-immolating in a thermonuclear, chain reaction DEMBO IMPLOSION !
I’ve re-registered from Greench to depl … er, independent !
lol; take it on the road, tom joad. but do tell me who’s faces/despots are featured in the ‘hamilton electors’ R video up yonder, aside from putin and hugo chavez? i know that i should know, but i do voices, not images in the main..
there’s more credibility to the old coot at the end of the bar boozing it up & ranting about The End of the World in the middle of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” than these whiners. They expect us to believe this CSPAN, Civics 101 Saturday morning cartoon about people of conscience resisting fascism from the high & lofty constitutional redoubt of the FUCKING ELECTORAL COLLEGE, which, after the Supreme Court, is the 2nd strongest bulwark against scarifying fascism!!!!?
where do you begin w/this “people of conscience” crap? I’m sure it’s b/c of their scrupulousness about their own hyper-sensitive consciences that got them into the freakin’ Electoral College in the 1st place. These are the same kinds of people who do shit like run the DNC & RNC who acid-refluxed up candidates Clinton & Trump in the 1st place, right? do such stuff as sit on the board for The Open Society Foundation or for the National Endowment for Democracy? real solid citizen types, just the kind of people to make sure *nothing* changes, as the founders clearly intended? these “let’s do a recount & you electors vote your conscience” dumbasses expect me in this day & age to believe that it matters one whit, e.g., whether Senators are selected by state legislatures or by popular vote? sorry, i’m not that stupid. ain’t there bigger fish to angle for? how many times have these same “the electoral college is my safe space” sore losers cursed the frickin’ electoral college????? make your *&^$%#@ minds up!
anyway, this same fake, bourgeoisie School House Rock bullshit about the “separation of powers” and “how a bill becomes a law” taught me when i was in school that “we survived the Brits, slavery, world wars, McCarthyism, the Depression, (quote) won (unquote) the Cold War” etc, etc., b/c of how goddam great our constitutional system is. ah, yes, we could only bring ourselves down, that’s how great we are. which Trump (still negative numbers of days into his term!) signifies.
To which I say: we & “our” “constitutional system” haven’t yet outlasted Henry Kissinger, or his pupil, HRC, so put down your book of fairy tales & work on something that means some something of anything. there are people freezing their asses off to stop pipelines you self-cossetting Daily Kossack Clintonista morons. Seriously? you gonna go to all this trouble for Hillary? smoke a bowl, relax, and go bowling. you’ll be much, much happier than you ever could be worrying about Hillary winning or not.
am i supposed to give a shit about trump breaking protocol by not staying at the white house but instead staying at trump tower at an additional $35 million dollar a year security expense? oh lord, the personality tics and breaches of decorum of these assholes is not determinative of the future. being concerned about the global significance of Trump calling Taiwan is as sub-sophomoric as reading “People” magazine (yes, the sort of NPR/PBS level view of how politics works in this country has an insistently voyeuristic quality to it: did Obama quit smoking? how does his “professorial style” affect his decision-making? how did Bill’s [or JFK’s] bimbo-banging mold his presidency? Hillary slandering Russia is about as intelligent as a Jerry Springer episode but w/some 3 syllable words so Gwyn Ifill types are impressed. Authority figures that sound like they shop at Whole Foods they are more than happy to bow down to. But Trump is so low-brow that he’d probably fart in public, something Obama would never do. let us all never consider what is in fact the case: Obama & people like him, their civility is the mask for their ghastly barbarity. you know, it’s very important that your EPA chief mouths words that you are familiar with, no matter how many hydro-fracking permits he gives out.
etc., etc. i could let blood out of this vein of liberal stupidity for some time….
oh, yes, excellent, and decorum whilst stabbing is infinitely preferable, isn’t it? but trump hysteria is so telling: “he’ll only accept one, i tell you ONE, briefing a day from the DNI! yanno what that means, dontcha? and EYE heard he lights his farts on fire at parties….
but sure, right on cue, the CIA is giving a big ole’ alleged ally-oop to the congresscritters who demanded an investigation into russian hacking of the elections (for wikileaks publication of course: two birds with one bomb):
‘‘CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports; Agency reportedly believes individuals acting for Moscow hacked Democrat party emails and gave them to WikiLeaks’ note the disparity between ‘concludes’ and ‘believes’, just like clapper and friends.
this really is the most surreal quadrennial circus i’ve ever seen, isn’t it? clinton/O exported fascism: good. trump domestic fascism: bad. assassinate elected governments to replace them with US puppets? good. arm them mightily in ‘foundation’ pay-to-play to please the sauds and israel? good. oh, yeah, O sending manpads to the moderate rebels in syria: good. 200 more (heh) special ops to syria? great! cuz they can provide cover for seven times a s many Xe/whatever mercenaries!
fook me, when ya see tucker carlson (!!!!) calling out some fool intel committee critter’s ‘russians hacked’ rubbish, ya know you’re totally thru the looking glass.
it’s a question?
thanks, jason, for the solidarity; i wuz startin’ to go a bit nutz over all this.
i almost commented on the russia thing this a.m. after my morning ritual peek at the NYT but had to fly. Russia hackers, Russian athletic doping, Russia this, Russia that, Russia in bed w/everyone & everything, incl Trump & his cabinet. i’m beginning to think the NYT has it in for Russia….
What all o’ y’all said. This action is good to the extent that it gives powerless Dem Party Or Bust loyalists fodder for their logorrheasoning, which comes from the on-high not fake news set. So now they get to learn people about the founding fathers’ intention in re. “the constitutionality of it all” inclusive a citation of the 19th of December (in case they forgot that nugget from 2000 when it was so en vogue, along with the date in January when constitutious objectifiers can try an’ refuse to certificized until someone like Gore smasheth his gavel down upon them nuggets of knowledge).
It reminds me of the “hooray science” crowd, who can personally verify next-to-nothing about the way the chemistry functions, but pontificate ad nauseum about the soundness of a peer review summary they think they understand because it confirms their political bias.
They don’t care much that the argument being made about the anti-constitutional nature that renders the President-elect unfit for office is precisely sound enough to apply to his opponent. Because they feel smart, informed, engaged. Smarter than you.
gads, yes: “their candidate isn’t fit for office, because: manchurian candidate, but ours is. although that’s the talk of the R hamilton electors, as well. but let’s not actually oust the electoral fraternity kids, because they’re all that stand between democracy and a ‘child rapist’ (hint, clue from tiny brain lessig).
i love your parallel w/ the ‘hooray science’ crowd. by the by, when did dems start spouting federalist papers including #68? yanno, that a negro slave counts as 3/5 of a person compromise? but oh, that ‘foreign agent’ section!
but 2000 and “constitutious objectifiers” is delightful, and you’ve made me remember katherine harris again.
zo…the big IF question: what would ensue if (not-a-fascist) hrc is crowned instead?
ResErection of the DEM adulterers’ (and mebbe children rapists’) administration. But, at least a 1.?, 2. Erdogan 4.Medvedev totalitarian’s “prevention”, all but Chavez sporting gauche Trumpish western coats and ties; traded instead for douche’ pantsuits. But, What The Hellary, even Bushit-sulfursniffing Hugo westernized before the U.N. :
And in any thoroughly sextist case, 4 outta 5 Ain’t BAD !
nah on D child-rapists; that was a hint for trumpian disqualification. thanks for erdogan and medvedyev; no. 1 is familiar, but i’m not comin’ up with a name. sure ain’t assad!
‘call a shrink’ , etc. i’d forgotten; thanx. yep, the west loves their own tyrants and dictators. pragmatism.
three interviews at DN!: StoryDec 06, 2016
Noam Chomsky: Trump’s Victory Recalls Memories of Hitler & Fascism’s Spread Across Europe
Noam Chomsky: Trump’s Climate Change Denialism Will Accelerate Global Race to Destruction
From Climate Change to Nuclear War, Noam Chomsky Warns of Literal Threats to Our Survival
via a commenter at naked capitalism on #fakenews:
“I heard Stephen Colbert lump Alex Jones together w/Wikileaks as if they were the same “fake news”. I have also repeatedly heard Samantha Bee refer to Julian Assange as a rapist. Sigh. Both of those comments are “fake news”. The allegations against JA are tissue thin and Wikileaks has NEVER been challenged about the truth of their releases. Please correct me if I am wrong.”
lol. “trump is/hires climate change denialist!!!” as measured by the standard of action as opposed to words, has there ever not been a c. c. denialist heading the WH, EPA, etc., etc.?
they haven’t ‘denied’, they just haven’t done shit. now…it’s likely too late, in any event. esp. because: military and factory farming carbon footprints, fracking galore, tra la la. yeah, his hires are creepy, esp. the trial balloons. but all msm are involved in putin/roosia derangement syndrome, because: trump is an enemy agent.
cripes, i’m of half a mind to go present a few things like the wapo and propornot to these deranged folks at a site that…no longer desired my presence. the feeling was mutual, lol. but srsl, if it ain’t the NYT or the wapo, once in a while digby…it’s all a lie. cia is good, this election was a coup, yanno the drill. blowin’ my ever-lovin’ mind.
gotta go make some dinner; i’ll be back.
I understand that the stage of grief after denial is bargaining. There are those who have not realized that global corporate feudalism won the election, and the imperial US political-economic-cultural elite of the past 70 years lost it badly. Moreover, although a lot of the 99% voted, their interests were nowhere on the ballot.
What is causing all the pretzel-posturing and screams is that we are in really uncharted territory as a political system. What seemed reasonable 228 years ago as a way to select (elect) a President have come down to a contradictory and highly factional mess–exactly what it was meant to prevent. If it seems like the wheels are falling off, they are.
What the electoral college will do is meet in its separate state capitals and vote for a choice for President. Despite all the state laws pledging electors to the winning candidate in the state, they need not select (elect) any of the candidates who ran. They could select anyone over age 35 who meets the rather sparse qualifications for office, even favorite sons of the state. Habit dies hard however. The most likely result is those states that Donald Trump won the popular vote by December 13, the date for states finalizing their votes, will cast their votes for Trump. The other states will cast their votes pro forma for Hillary Clinton. Unless the final vote, which now stands at 136,737,898 total votes for all candidates, changes the popular vote in states that were majority Trump, the electoral college will likely elect Donald Trump.
Given the mechanics and politics of the electoral college. I don’t see 38 “faithless” Trump electors emerging to vote for Hillary Clinton although if there were some other acceptable candidate from the number of Americans over 35, some number might vote for them instead. So far no one has pushed a convincing alternative to Trump that Republican and Democratic electors could agree on. And the long distance negotiations between state electors to come to a consensus if difficult even in the age of social media.
Constitutionally, yeah the electors could do it. But there is no precedent even with egregioius candidates and divisive Presidential elections in the past. Jackson, Pierce, Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge all got their due in the electoral college. It is only when third parties actually won states and prevented any candidate of getting a majority of electoral college votes that the House of Representatives decided. Even the Supreme Court intervention of 2000 did not cause the electoral college to alter its mechanistic process.
Even David Gergen is ready for Trump.
The Clinton dynasty and the Bush dynasty have ended, no matter how much some of their fans hold out hope for Chelsea or Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush.
Whatever checks and balances for a Trump administration and GOP Congress will come either from internal Republican divisions or from the grassroots. The Democrats are still too divided to obstruct Trump the way Republicans obstructed Obama. And Democrats are the party of doing more, not the party of small government that does nothing. A fundamental contradiction to obstruction.
Those who are advocating immediate resistance to the Trump regime have no specifics of what that resistance looks like–at least, not yet.
Given the Obama National Park Service’s closure of the Lincoln Memorial to the Women’s March on January 20, just having a march there anyway would likely be the first act of resistance that would give an estimate of the size of resistance.
The Washington Post and New York Times are just clickbaiting with empty articles about Russian influence and “fake news”. Sure would like to know how PropOrNot decided on its list of 200. It is someone’s hit list.
Between now and January 20 is going to be a big sit-and-watch-the-circus popcorn event with regard to the Democrats and Republicans.
I guess I did have stages of grief once Obama was elected, THD, and as you say, there seems only the truth of the matter being that the wheels are indeed coming off with respect to electoral politics as we know it.
This extraordinary time in which no party affiliation seems possible or palatable presents an entirely open field of activity – it’s unprecedented. We seem to be so aware of all the imperfect wheelings and dealings which in effect would only replace one horribly imperfect leader with another equally horribly imperfect leader – where to go from there? Even those cleverly chosen vp candidates are (whilst unknown for the most part) equally horrible to contemplate under the wistful hope that a corrupt Congress could bring itself to impeach whichever of the two most rotten are finally left standing atop the dung heap.
The only thing I can say is that it really won’t matter what the electors decide. We are going to lose anyway. So then, the only way to go from there will be up. My Social Security increase for the coming year was .03%. Oh, thank you, Democrats. That came to three whole dollars. I know, I shouldn’t kvetch – wendye has way less. I wonder what I’ll spend it on, and if all things considered, next year I’ll look back at these golden years when I could complain.
I liked hearing the pope say “Only peace is holy! War is not holy!” Good for him. I would vote for him in a heartbeat. Maybe the electors will choose the pope.
Look who’s on the train. Does he mean left Putin or right Putin?
Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC 6h6 hours ago
Russia is trying to break the backs of democracies – and democratic movements – all over the world.
More signs of self-implosion in Asgard.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/mainstream-media-puts-out-the-call-for-pro-trump-columnists/2016/12/09/2153fdd2-bca7-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.b879d212c361
Making it more and more difficult to choose your own brainwash.
‘in asgard’, lol x 3! wowser, that wapo ‘non-hit’ piece was the best hit Evah, wasn’t it? thanks for that; made my day.
ha ho hee hee: yeppers, i’d seen earlier that linsey g. (and yes, i’m tryin’ so hard not to call him aunt pittypat (john aravosis) was doin’ a scarlet pimpernel thang: “i’ll seek him here, i’ll seek him there, that cunning bastard…putinel!’ grrrr implied.
now i hadn’t known that O had put the kibosh on the women’s march, but that was another ‘political decision’, no? yeah, there will and should be organized protests…when the shit hits the fan. for now? i kinda agree w/ margaret kimberly.
oh, and believe it or not, both alternet (iirc) and NC have carried a piece by mark ames (gasp) about the originators of ‘the list’ (propornot). he claims ukies, but it’s tediously long, and iirc, the finale was kinda ‘meh’. i’m sure its still up at NC.
as for the 38 clinton needs *if* some Rs drain away votes from T, who knows? i haven’t checked back, but a couple days ago there were 7, and man, have they been on the talk shows. nine more days, tick tock. and of course that’s what this putin/roossian derangement syndrome is about now, eh?
the folks at my link up yonder were calling it ‘a coup’; they seem not to know how many coups clinton, the cia, deep state have completed. fie on such blindness. srsly.
Given that the electoral college can choose whoever they decide and that Alexander Hamilton saw that as a way to short-circuit democratically-elected tyrants, “unfaithful” electors is hardly a coup. I find it difficult to imagine Republicans breaking for Hillary Clinton, popular vote or no. A strange electoral college move would likely vote for another “unifying” Republican. Try to imagine who that might be if unifying is to include Clinton voters. The simplest, least controversial, and more devastating move is to elect Trump; that’s what I see happening.
Yes, lots of non-US tweets savoring the irony of US concern about a coup.
From the anti-Trump folks, their concern about a coup is the rapid legislative consolidation of authoritarian power in Trump’s first hundred days with a pliant Congress. That is where the shit hits the fan and they are recommending that folks be ready to resist from Day One.
BTW, Allen West, torturer and former Congressman, was interviewed by the Trump transition team foreign policy and national security folks last week and now advocates exterminating mooslims. No longer the painting of “collateral damage”.
i’m knackered and out for the night, so more in the a.m. 4:30 comes early. ;-) but the ‘coup’ i’d mentioned up yonder was a coup by…putin/roosians, they’re so convinced, etc. sleep well, dream well.
names of possible Rs for the T electors to switch to, john kasich is the only one i remember. and it would seem unlikely as all-giddy-up that 38 R anti-trumpistas would decide to ‘be fair, and reflect the popular vote’, wouldn’t it? but i confess i’d had to go back and read ‘how electors are chosen’ to get that the potential duopoly parties’ electors are automatically
elected in the winner take all scenario. reading lessig again, i guess he did understand that. so it makes all of this even crazier, save for ‘the roosians hacked the election: it’s your DUTY to fix it!’ potential.
so many trial balloons are out there on his alleged cabinet choices; i’m not gonna get exercised yet, myownself. you should see the fear-mongering messages in my inbox. ;-)
on edit: i’d forgotten that kasich had declined any possible votes. you may like reading ‘a trump junta?’ at wsws.org. think i’ll skip it for now… i peeked at the ending: ‘billionaires and generals’, arrgh.
…hi wd
…Amusing as it is to now see DumShit D’s zealots and hacks waxing and howling about a Big Mean-+Bad R POTUS-Elect ( or not? ) run WH where were these same zealots and hacks anytime during Obama’s R Lite regime?
…Being Silent politically has consequences…..imagine that…
…sta
mornin’, arrow. exactly right, and your framing pinged a column i’d meant to read earlier for just that title. Dolores Vek’s ‘Actually Existing Fascism’. in part:
“With the election of Donald Trump, we’re being told that now is the time to fear fascism in America.
What is this nightmare-vision of a fascist America supposed to look like? This alternate-reality USA, under the uniquely vicious reign of the Trump regime, is one in which minorities have to fear for their lives. The president will speak in openly white supremacist language. Black Americans will have to fear death at the hands of police and vigilantes; latin@s will have to fear deportation; Muslims, Islamophobic violence; and so on. The good people of humanity will tremble as Trump wields America’s fearsome armed forces, secret police, elite death squads, drones, and surveillance technology for the good of himself and his cronies. Earth’s ecosystem—the very promise of a habitable planet—will be sacrificed by men who put profits ahead of human needs and the good of mankind.
Truly, fascist America would a terrifying place. This vision is so terrifying that mere days after the election, even the most conformist liberals have suddenly gotten in touch with the radical antifa apparently slumbering inside each one of them. Highly publicized protests have already occurred in several major cities.”
then she laughs that daily kos has finally found the mettle to call for a general strike on inauguration day… now some are claiming that under a T administration, protests will be illegal, and stamped down hard. but surely there’d be some tipping point of participation that would moot that, no? yanno, the ‘rise like lions from your sleep; we are many, they are few’? well sure, ‘they’ have the 101st airborne and drone fleets, but still… ;-)
so many of the clintonistas refuse to see what she and O have done to people of color around the globe that it’s just plain mystifying, not to mention selfish to the Nth degree.
nice to see you; dreary here w/ rain melting all the snow.
on edit: i ♥ synchronicity to bits! i just opened today’s popular resistance newsletter, and found these two on topic pieces featured:
‘Naureckas: Trump Son-in-Law’s Paper Outlines ‘a Complete Crackdown on Dissent’, By FAIR
‘DisruptJ20: Call for a bold mobilization against the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017’
“We call on all people of good conscience to join in disrupting the ceremonies. If Trump is to be inaugurated at all, let it happen behind closed doors, showing the true face of the security state Trump will preside over. It must be made clear to the whole world that the vast majority of people in the United States do not support his presidency or consent to his rule.”
it may just be that USians will be able to discover what sort of government and rulers they want, eh? if the lines are to be as clear as most seem to believe. god’s blood, i hate that he’s the president-elect, but less so than if t’were the current rep. of the clinton dynasty.
wake me when the vast majority of the people in the US refuse the US gov’t in toto.
people really do refuse to learn anything from this greatest show on earth, the never-ending election. trump spent, compared to HRC, *nothing* on advertising. nothing. he ain’t a ragamuffin scarecrow from some backscrabble, ramshackle children of the soil butcher holler. his whole political career is an amalgam of media interventions over the years to prop up his brand & persona, this cheap ass swindler casino mogul real estate speculator. i’m embarrassed to know anything at all about this fool (ditto HRC). i’m not certain what the end game is of all this anti-russian hysteria in the MSM & the attempt to guilt Trump by some kind of association, but it’s also part of the same media candyland fantasy world that continuously puts people like Trump forward as something other than a walking fire hydrant for my dog to piss on. manufacturing controversy equals manufactured interest, so, says the NYT and its deep state handlers, let’s keep manufacturing crises! our advertisers will surely love it.
This. Verbal gold.
you might just be an anarchist™! srsly, i’d like it if people would keep obeying traffic signals and which side of the road to drive on. ;-)
i’ll admit that after the fridge repairman said he loved T esp. cuz he’s a ‘self-made man’, i binged. pissed away his bequeathed fortune, was the recipient of several bankruptcy write-downs, but yeah: click bait horror stories were his advertising. who said there’s no such thing as bad advertising? prolly eddie bernays, yes? but that is contrary to your reckoning, reading again….
hrc i know only too much about, as well as her wandering sex-addict hubbie (“she put it up with it for US!” cry her adherents), but clintonistas had her reified as ‘the new normal: amerika’s mother’. well, mebbe a mommie dearest, bereft of conscience in her dynastic drive for power. oof, kinda a metaphor for the U Imperium.
i love your ‘manufactured interest’ meem; thank you. me? i’m gonna package up grammy’s cookies and other baked snacks to send out to out families; we’ll mebbe send some two-dollar bills to the grandchirren (without apology).
yes, i just went a to a ex-mas party where a couple of younger kids were beaming about their $2 from meemaw whereas a slightly older kid snickered at them & then whined about his $5 gift. the little kids may be better human beings, but the older kid is fer sure a more “mature” capitalist & consumer.
happy hanukkah ya’ll. i know it’s early but keep your lamp light trimmed & burning anyway.
and thanks davidly.
your parallel mini-vignette made me cry, jason; thank you. my response an amplification of the apparent truth of that would take far too long for tonight. tomorrow, then?
mr. wd and i were doing a three stooges’ ‘tryin’ to make merry xmas’ santa’s workshop quasi-comedy all afternoon/evening. ridiculously, only two of us were here, unless one counts my pony, who really f’ed things up unintentionally. mr wd is listening to a loooong video from the camp which has been renamed ‘all nations camp’ from oceti sakowin. the council fire was put out, built again, but he’s not been able divine the meaning. but the singing and hand-drumming behind me from his laptop….is what it’s all about, or…should be all about. “we”, not “I”, etc. chase iron eyes (lakota law project) is speaking.
sleep well, and davidly was right. ;-) you’re a peach.
addendum: i almost left a song, but thought better of it. but it did remind me i left a response and a townes van zandt song to your last comment on the ‘vets stream in’, etc. thread.
nite again. la luna bella rose during a brief hole in the clouds; she’s waxing toward full. and yes, i howled hello to her; the neighbors prolly call the sheriffs now and again to complain. i say fuck em if they can’t take it in stride. ;-) yes,kannuka/ channukka; doubt we’ll light the mennorah this year; slaveway stopped carrying the wee candles, ha ha. ya might think the opposite given the burgeoning anti-bds and criticism of israel laws.
The full moon is called Phra Jan, holy moon, here among the Buddhists.
A time to make merit…
lovely to know, v arnold. is it pronounced ‘fra’ or prah’? or for that matter, with a long ay?
Ph is a “P” sound and it’s a short “a”. Jan is also a short a.
some updates:former UK ambassador craig murray calls bullshit on the never-ending ‘russian hackers’ rubbish stories (yanno: leaks that the 17 intel agencies swore showed that *explicitly*), then offers this:
“As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.”
i was elated when i’d finally clicked into RT just now, once i did some news gathering from standing rock (i’ll post it later) and found: ‘DNC hack blamed on Russia may have been Obama’s false flag operation – former US ambassador Bolton’
oh, and jeffrey st. clair linked to this exposé: ‘Timberg’s Tale: Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites’ by Pam Martens/Russ Martens
The insane Russophobia coming out of the U.S. is just sickening.
Murry and Assange should be declared hero’s of the realm.
The last 16 years of U.S. governance has been absolute lunacy.
Beam me up Scotty, I want off the third rock from Sol.
wasn’t it a commenter at ian welsh’s site who’d said close to “tsk, tsk; it was illegal of murray to have said that”? but anyway, yes; clearly the red scare hysteria is evidence of a flailing, hopefully dying empire having realized that a multi-polar world is at hand. an i’d meant to say days ago ‘yes’ to your reminding me of the dulles bros. and ‘the devil’s chessboard’; wish i’d read that and howard zinn’s book when i was still able t read, bless his heart.
thanks for the pronunciation guide; Phra Jan is up now over our small meneffee mountain, almost full…and sublime, and i can almost believe: holy.
Ian’s place is great. Ian is a very savvy guy, but, there are some genuine loons and the lead bully MFI. I’m cutting down my involvement there.
Ugh!!! MY BAD!!! WD, sorry for not giving you kudos for calling out MFI for his bullying ways; 3 cheers.
and mfi continues to be ian’s hall monitor; guess they both like it. ugh, did he and two of his pals stalk me at fdl. one finally got banned for it, another had his assistant editor job taken away, i’m assuming for the same reason. yeah, loads of folks love ian, but i need to stay away from there, as the level of hubristic ego (is that redundant, lol?) really epitomizes the failure of our ‘society’, for lack of a better term. as in: so much ‘I’, so little ‘we’, unless it concerns partisan and/or identity politics.
you and i may disagree somewhat as who the current loons are, but you’d know the cat of characters better than i. for the most part, in blogging life, i reckon that calling dissenters to an argument ‘trolls’ ends up being counter-productive. now if threads are constantly high-jacked for fun and power-tripping: meh.
may i make a bit of fun of a couple of ian’s past notions? one was re: climate change promises that there should be a UN climate navy: kapow! the other was that old people and folks w/ no chirren have less ‘stake in the game’, so their votes should count less. lol: mebbe 3/5 of a vote? ‘vote your self-interest’, isn’t that how we so often go wrong?
i will say that once reality checker left here in mighty disagreement w/ a couple of us, i’m glad that he finds ian’s place so much more comfortable.
‘objective reality’ as an absolute isn’t a theme i can adhere to, but i figured i’d better stay the hell away from that one. i used to fail too convince reality checker of my contrary musings. ;-) best to you, and actually, the moon is phra jan tonight, not last night.
…hi wd
…It would seem the agents and princes of unknown/unseen hands and minds of the inner, deeper real power rings and circles of USian Empire are very interested in mounting and showing some ongoing Misdirection Theatre where Putin and Russia must be cast and portrayed as The Supreme USian Choice For The Other Villain.
…Why? Seems most likely in order to divert possible political/legal Eye Of Sauron examination of what was revealed by WikiLeaks about the Clintons, Podesta, Hillary and DNC and Obama WH links and dot connects. Evidently somebody wants to conceal what some malevolent/maleficent human beings have been doing or want to keep doing. Seeing how 9/11 was quite successful at doing and hiding much USian Empire malice evidently someone may want to shapeshift recent POTUS election outcome and get away with it.
…The defining proof of a ” turning of the table ” in all this would be and is if/had Hillary Clinton The Corrupt ” won ” by crooked and corrupted political ( legal as well ? ) means and methods now known and knowable how would the DumShit D’s have reacted to Trump’s backers and supporters carrying on like the DumShit D’s have been since the election? The D’s orchish howling(s) would have been loud.
…ObamaWH and CIA components in this Misdirection Theatre about Putin and the Russian’s stopping Queen Hillary from getting her Coronation reek of the worst of malformed politics and political conduct. USians at this point should understand we are being badly misled about too much for the worst of reasons. Very badly misled.
…Those who now want to keep doing and peddling more R vs. D junk politics and keep telling and selling WarCriminal and Killer of Innocent Human Beings Obama and Clinton and the D’s as being better than Trump or Cheney or Bush are some real political fuckwits. Cheney, Bush and their minions would/should be in jail as should also Obama and the Clintons and their orcs.
…They very likely would be if we USians had a valid and legitimate functioning legal/ethical/moral/political regime in place and not this post 1945 USian Empire’s perversion of the good and justice done.
…Blaming and casting China and Russia as Villains for USian politcal/legal and Rule by/of Law failures is a very dangerous path to be on as unlike WW1 and WW2 it is beyond doubt WW3 will come to North America in very real and deadly atomic ways.
…sta
mornin’, arrow. i suppose at this point i’m not sure how many rings of power are out there, how many are shared, and how silly of me to not really grasp all of the reasons anyone would want to wield them, but those are questions for shrinks and philosophers, aren’t they? is there One Ring to rule them all?
aren’t the new power blocs that may and/or are leading to a multi-polar world rather stretching and shifting, including leaders like modi keeping his options open altogether, while genuflecting toward not only power, but the power of money and armaments? i still tend to ‘think’ in images, which has so many drawbacks; many of you can see the power structures from the air.
not all that long ago we saw that profit knows no national boundaries, and while that’s certainly still true, a in ‘rule by multinational corporatocracy’, nationalism seems more ascendant than ever. but oh, yes, the world changed post-9/11; carte blanche for military and intel expenditures, the evil NDAA that some now want proscribed now because: trump. but hell, he’ll inherit the rings of the O administration, won’t he?
but yes to your thoughts, and as you’ve long said: ‘it didn’t have to be this way’. how many thomas paines have we ignored? and why? another question for shrinks, but i believe the answer lies w/ both bernays and allie miller. sure are interesting times, sorry to use the cliché. but how fun: the WI recount gained T close to 200 more votes. sorry, jill stein, but at least you get to keep the rest of those millions to ‘improve electoral politics’, lol.
sorry to be so disjointed; i had a rough night, and keep trying to assemble a new standing rock diary in my head, as well.
on edit: what might the MSM see as their jobs in a T administration?
Interesting that Trump has manipulated downward the stock in Boeing and now Lockheed-Martin at least for a day each. Both times it was tweets charging cost overruns.
My current interpretation of the Russophobia is that the neoliberal neoconservatives (now apparently fused in the person of Victoria Nuland) saw “fear of Putin” as holding Europe together as the European Union devolved under the pressure of austerity. Knowing Trump’s close relations with Putin on business deals and the Trump campaign’s growing relationships with white religious ethnic nationalist authoritarian leaders (one a US fave), the normally Republican deep state nasty women and bad hombres bolted to Clinton and joined their counterparts already so aligned. Now they are politically stranded and lashing back in the only way they know how–regime change.
BTW, using John Bolton as a news source on false flags is about as reliable as using Allen West as an advocate of human rights. His only value seems to be schadenfreude.
What the hysteria over the Russian hacks is distracting from is the fact that someone (and likely Russian hacks) stole and disclosed malware zero days from NSA cyberwarfare servers.
A close reading of an article swamped in the Comey letter flap will show how seriously the US intelligence community has botched cyber-defense while collecting data of everyone.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/
Amazing malpractice and dereliction of duty by the deep state.
TarheelDem sprach: “My current interpretation of the Russophobia is that the neoliberal neoconservatives (now apparently fused in the person of Victoria Nuland) saw “fear of Putin” as holding Europe together as the European Union devolved under the pressure of austerity.”
Like Dems saw fear of Trump as holding their party together.
Perzactly.
interesting analysis, and i’d blown by the fact that the EU and US constantly claimed that putin wants to ‘disintegrate the EU’. zo…cover for the stolen malware zero makes sense, albeit that it’s way over my head, as is your esquire link w/o studying it, but others will likely grasp it at once.
but how hilarious bolton’s claim is, and that photo! like hollywood created him to be the insane megalomaniac head of a nefarious james bond organization.
ah, those f-35s; boeing’ll come out okay, 40 or so are on their way to israel, some to canada, who knows which other nations who are ostensibly ‘our partners in peace’? a hundred million bucks they say israel paid for each; must be a special rate cuz of the new MOU?
thanks for your thinking here. on edit: more on T befriending “white religious ethnic nationalist authoritarian leaders” please?
Of course, the pre-eminent one that has a lot of folks worried is the pragmatic Russian Orthodox white nationalist Vladimir Putin. (Folks who have not kept up with that consequence of oligarchy and the shock doctrine likely think in Cold War terms still.) It was the anti-religiosity (“blasphemy” from the view of the religious) that got Pussy Riot in trouble in their protest of Putin’s autocracy. Putin’s partnership with the Russian Orthodox church leaders is something to watch; it gives him the legitimacy of a popular cultural organization and also gives him reach over the geography of ethnic Russia.
Then there is Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, who lately might have become persona non grata and relocated to the US. Who knows?
Geert Wilders and the Party of Freedom in Netherlands.
Then there are the international associates of Stephen Bannon in the EU countries, which likely are the parties putting the most pressure on the EU as the left runs out of steam. And the cutting political argument there is again immigration.
Those were the early reports of Trump’s international reach right after the election. Might be knee-jerk reactions but it did point to a realignment of the default politics of a variety of EU countries that worked toward devolution and defederalization.
” Now they are politically stranded and lashing back in the only way they know how–regime change.”
Great point, THD. It goes along with what I’ve held onto from Bill Black’s piece yesterday at nakedcap. He’d lampooned the NYT’s pontifications on ‘select’ Democrats conversing over Chinese food on ways forward, not realizing that they lost because folk wanted jobs, whilst in a panic over losing their own jobs. These people have no clue. Coups is all they know.
NC had a good article on links about the goodness available in not watching mainstream news. I can definitely vouch for the therapy, never more needed. Sun, moon, stars – still with us and aren’t we fortunate in this? I even wonder if the methane will bring us all to a better reality. There is something magnificent about what nature is doing to counteract our mess – like the positive side of hurricanes (which nobody wants to be in, including me.) I even smiled at a thrasher this morning and wished him well, in spite of his evil eye and rapier like curved beak. He’s just trying to love life the way we all do.
Indeed. On Sunday we had an osprey try to take a squirrel or two from our lawn. The osprey hangs out at a lake a block away that has a lot of suspended clay (development runoff) that makes finding fish difficult. So for the moment, it turns to other sources of food. Strikingly beautiful bird at that close a range.
not mine to answer, but i will. good sentiments until you got to ” I even wonder if the methane will bring us all to a better reality.” please explain what you see is even close to so about that, please? “the positive side of hurricanes”?
methane contributes at least 30 times more greenhouse gasses than carbon, including by fracking chemicals released, and as the permafrost in the icecaps melt. (factory farming, too, but let’ skip that, and that disappearing wetlands that used to be some carbon sinks.) i’m stymied as to what you see the upside of island nations having their seas rise to flood them out (the wealthy live on the hills above, of course) or the devastating hurricanes that bring disease and deforestation and mudslides and flooding to the subsistence farmers, say in haiti?
sorry to be cranky about it, but am i missing something? that you and thd see out of time species in your yards means…what, exactly? color me buffaloed, both of you, if you will.
Simplistically, as is my usual, wendye. I was looking at natural responses to man’s foolish wrecking of the status quo with respect to the balance of things creative. Hurricanes in their increasing intensity and ferocity cleanse the oceans by re-incorporating the elements we have driven asunder. Methane, as I said, sends the cold upwards into the clouds so that we don’t have a galloping heat wave ( bad as it is when the clouds aren’t there) but a gallop in the other direction.
In other words, earth being a closed system with all the elements we make use of and vandalize or prostitute, once nature has ‘seen’ what we are doing, it compensates. Not for us perhaps, but for the earth itself to restart that process. I didn’t say it in a humanly positive way – I said it in terms of what might happen after we are gone or hopefully just clinging to existence and subsistence in whatever way that is given to whomever survives this catastrophe. Didn’t mean to say it isn’t catastrophic and we shouldn’t make all attempts possible to ameliorate what seems to be occurring – and most certainly I am very probably entirely wrong. Please don’t take it to heart. I would love to be wrong.
As to my thrasher encounter, it simply registered with me as my own inability to comprehend all the savage aspects, just the mystery of life living itself,if you will.
thank you all for your thinking on why the imperium is ramping up the red scare now; likely we’ve left no stone unturned, so to speak. ;-)
this made me laugh when i’d clicked into RT earlier: “With a new presidential administration assuming office, it is important to help policymakers anticipate and avert potential crises that could arise and threaten US interests,”, so: ‘NATO-Russia war billed as top risk for US in 2017, alongside terrorism – CFR survey’
“Nonetheless, the CFR’s Center for Preventive Action (CPA), which conducted the survey, believes that if any escalation – intended or accidental – takes place alongside Russia-NATO borders, it will stem “from assertive Russian behavior in Eastern Europe” – and not any sort of provocation by Baltic NATO members, whether it be renewed force buildups or mass-scale military exercises.”
Thanks for everyone’s thoughts here. I went to the three local “press,” sources in this legislative district and successfully urged then to interview the closest resident Electoral College voter about his intent on Monday.
Now the public has several good published quotes from a potentially dementia affected stalwart octogenarian GOP operative, emphatically committed to vote for Trump come hell or high water, along with several claims of superiority of their candidate(s) (from commentators), even after Cruz handily won the GOP primary in WI.
I simply filed the comments for later use toward the greater local public good and larger public interest as things unfold next month, when most assuredly, the slashing hoofs and pointed horns of those dread untamed scapegoats are released from their pens to excuse the anticipated failures and disappointments over their chosen political saviors and solutions.