I wonder how long the Palin/Trump wing of the party will persist in dissing community organizers (like myself) even as they get throttled at the polls by community organizers?
I mean, this suits me just fine, but it’s so aggressively self-injurious that it ought to be subject to natural selection. Right?
It’s a great picture of Trump HQ.
Quinnipiac has Trump down 10.
South Carolina with only a 2.6 pt lead for Trump.
Republicans are a faith based organization. They should start praying now. I also recommend drinking (the communion wine) heavily.
MY POSSIBLY-RACIST BURQA QUESTION:
For some people, a burqa is a locus of pride. For others, it’s a symbol of oppression. Millions of women freely and happily choose to wear burqas. Millions of women are forced to wear them, and are subject to grievous punishment if they refuse. To the second group, they are a symbol of hateful oppression, to the former they are very much otherwise.
If I think of this in parallel with the Confederate flag issue, my conclusions feel wonky and racist. In many ways, the burqa is more intrusive: it’s not merely a symbol, it’s actually used, actually imposed, in a real utilitarian way that a flag is not.
I’m like that old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, where Calvin is trapped in a world where he can ‘see both sides’ of an issue. Until he snaps out of it, to his great relief. So someone, please, set me straight.
I find it best to let someone who truly understands the situation speak to it: http://www.theexmuslim.com/2016/08/24/burkini-bikini-false-equivalence-disproportionate-outrage/
Well, she is smart as fuck. Many many thanks for the link.
She is impressive. You’re quite welcome.
we should pay attention to what an oppressed Muslim woman thinks about how society should respond/relate to/regulate oppressed Muslim women???
Get real!
</snark>
Seriously, agree that’s brilliant. We (looking at you, French — and also too in our national mirror!) should listen!
Probably does not apply to most of Europe, but France has a long history of being aggressively secular.
The deep roots of French secularism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3325285.stm
The Algerian wave of Muslim immigrants knew exactly what would be required for residency and adjusted accordingly. A comment on that link has testimony from a woman who lived back in those years.
“This did not lead to an immediate questioning of secularism. The first immigrants had no desire to find in France the mullahs they had left behind.
Many of these older migrants are now shocked to see their children adopt conservative Islamic practices, and are at the forefront of moves to ban headscarves from schools.” (from the link)
It seems like special pleading to a lot of French.
There is plenty of research to support that the turn towards religion and perceived tradition among Muslim second generation Frenchmen is bolstered by discrimination. So of course it is answered by more discrimination, because the alternative would be stuff like a return to the full employment policies that existed when the grandparents arrived.
Even though I’m a francophile in most regards, I find these trends appalling.
I just want to let you know that the ban has now been overturned.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/frances-controversial-burkini-ban-overturned-8710793
Unfortunately, this probably means that the far right is going to run on a ban in the election next spring. And the establishment right is not far behind with Sarkozy promising to ban non-pork options in school canteens. And mandatory bacon is hardly about secularism.
Did French public schools ever have a policy of offering fish on Fridays? And how many French are Catholic???? Only 88%.
A wine-loving, sausage-eating people that kidnapped the POPE twice to make their point is now expected to roll over for cry-bullies? Aren’t Westerners expected to respect the public cultural norms in Muslim countries? Even if they are born there? I think you get shot if you don’t.
Well, aren’t they the little hypocrites? There HAVE been public school options for religious diets in the past. Guess the French are going militant on this.
An enforced all-pork-all-the-time school canteen menu/diet?
Doesn’t seem plausible.
Donald Trump, black people have everything to lose if they vote for you
By Leonard Greene
You asked the question.
And, though I imagine it was nothing more than a rhetorical question, it is still a question that, given the subject matter, deserves an answer.
You, after all, are the same man who relentlessly questioned the citizenship of the nation’s first black President.
That was before you dragged your feet and double-talked your way through questions — there’s that word again — about the support of white supremacist David Duke.
………………………….
What the hell do you have to lose?”
Well, here goes, in no particular order:
No. 1: My dignity.
No. 2: My self-respect.
No. 3: My standing among family and friends, black or white, and anyone who has ever held me in high regard.
No. 4: My future.
No. 5: My children’s future.
No. 6: Their children’s future.
Serious answer: As long as people outside of areas of strong community organizers are listening.
That includes some Northeastern, Midwestern, and Pacific Northwest states.
Remember that the objective this year has to be creating a workable Congress either through Democratic majorities, scared GOP members of Congress, or a huge Presidential win. The media has to be so dazzled that it shouts down the Wurlitzer (is that possible?)
And this should be good news, but the campaigns are flying blind unless they have good in-house polls. Meanwhile the random walk of polling trends is walking back toward the Trump direction. And the 538 polls-plus economic correction is still discounting Clinton instead of Trump. It is not a “Morning in America” situation. 538 Polls-plus nationally has Clinton with a 4.8% margin in the popular vote. That story is “divided electorate” for now, which means the Republican rush to the the exits either has not yet occurred or is overrated.
The variance in the 538 model even with the tightening from the Polls-Plus model is still pretty wide. And there are several local peaks in the distribution the tendencies in the data that seem to be in the relative same places over the current days. Those might be quantum artifacts of the voting by electoral college or they might point to some underlying differences regionally, or demographic differences manifested regionally. I have found departures from a normal distribution interesting to watch, even if in the end they turn out to be random.
…is a wee bit premature. But possible. So keep up the spirit.
Slightly off-topic, but this is important news:
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnell-tpp-not-coming-up-this-year
August 25, 2016, 02:36 pm
McConnell: Senate won’t take up TPP this year
By Jordain Carney
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appeared to close the door Thursday on the Senate taking up the Obama administration’s signature Asia-Pacific trade deal during what’s left of the president’s term.
“The current agreement, the Trans-Pacific [Partnership], which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year,” McConnell said at the Kentucky State Farm Bureau breakfast Thursday…
Not cheering until the lame duck is over. McConnell may say that but he’s not known for his honesty.
Yes, he could well be trying to take the subject off the table for vulnerable Republicans, esp Senators. If his lips are moving, he is probably lying.
Vigilance is appropriate.
So is happiness.
Until community organizers deliver mid term results.
John Pepper, former CEO of Proctor and Gamble on Putin
Diplomacy is diplomacy. Soft power is military action disguised as diplomacy. Hillary Clinton and the current foreign policy establishment need to learn that conflict is not inevitable and that no nations actually has the intention to use its maximal capability in war, even North Korea.
We demand that everyone understand that about the United States–Oh, we really are not itching to do a first strike with nuclear weapons. But reading our capabilities the way we read the capabilities of foreign nations says otherwise, and that accelerates an arms race without constant respectful diplomacy and trustworthiness (what the Japanese diplomats lacked in 1941) to communicate what our honest intentions actually are and wisdom to understand the intentions of other leaders.
Our ability to create cartoon villians of other nations and their leaders has not been helpful to American foreign policy, certainly since World War II and possibly since the Civil War.
Pepper is one part of the elite who still understand diplomacy and foreign policy.
BTW, the turning point for Putin traces back to the abrogation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the controversy over the Sochi Olympics. The first of these was a Bush administration foreign policy mistake of the first order in train with the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century.
Yet another mess that W made. And the controversy over the Sochi Olympics drove Putin deeper into Russian Orthodox nationalism and made him see the protest of Pussy Riot as a Western attempt to destabilize Russia like Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, and Algeria were being destablilized.
If Putin reacted to the controversies of the Sochi Olympics by driving himself deeper into Russian Orthodox nationalism, that was his choice. And if he made that choice, it was transparently self-serving.
Western criticisms of the brutal public beatings of members and supporters of Pussy Riot when they held a protest at the Olympics, and Western criticisms of the tremendous corruption and graft which were revealed to have happened during the planning and constructions of Olympic infrastructures, and Western criticisms of the other civil rights violations being suffered by Russians to this day, are legitimate criticisms.
The construction of your comment almost makes it seem as if you believe Westerners might have been better served by laying off any criticism of Putin at all, and if they had done so foreign relations might be better now. My view is that we had laid off Russian critiques our foreign relations would be about the same because Putin appears to need to stir up nationalism among Russian citizens because it helps him crush dissents caused by his policy changes and domestic assassinations of journalists and others he classifies as political enemies.
I believe that what our diplomats do in our name needs to be effective and not be needlessly provocative of other nuclear powers. This his nothing to do with US public opinion except to the extent that our government cheerleads the media as an instrument of a failed foreign policy. We’ve seen that failure on many fronts over my 70 years. The peace we delivered after the collapse of the Soviet Union has set the stage for Putin’s popularity; we (and Boris Yeltsin) maneuvered Russia into a position in which only an authoritarian nationalist leader connected to the economic oligarchs could successfully create stability in a country as large as the remaining Russian Federation.
And then US policy went on a war footing, abrogating the only treaty that erased the capability of any nation doing a pre-emptive first strike. The Soviet Union when it existed and Russia now interpreted the Reagan push for missile defense as signalling US intentions (remember capabilities being interpreted as intentions) to launch a pre-emptive first strike against it. And Reagan cartooning the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” did not help allay those fears.
Russia and Ukraine came to an agreement after the separation of Ukraine to split the navy bases and to have a mutual defense agreement with Ukraine acting as a neutral country buffering Russia as Finland has done for many years. That was the understanding in the West and in Russia until Bush and the CIA meddled in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia. The first Russia permitted with protest. The second drew Russian mobilization to its borders to protect parts of its territory that Georgia sought to annex. This is the lens through which Russia, and likely not just Putin, viewed the Arab Spring–Western interference in the internal politics of a country.
From the Russian viewpoint, the US/NATO in moving the Baltics and other adjoining countries into NATO was threatening (1) Russia’s understanding of its sphere of influence and (2) eliminating a potential neutral country that could swing between US/NATO and Russian interests depending up their own interests. From the Russian perspective, Finland during the Cold War had been a stabilizing influence that the hard boundary in Germany wasn’t. The incorporation of the Baltics into NATO did not become a threat of capabilities until the US/NATO started forward deployment of air missile defenses and basing into Eastern Europe contrary to earlier US declarations of intentions. Again, Bush and PNAC.
The escalation of the past two years on a separate track from the limited cooperation in eliminating Daesh/ISIS/ISIL has disturbed the Russian foreign policy establishment as well as Putin. Putting Sebastapol and Kaliningrad (the Black Sea fleet and the Baltic fleet) were unnecessary and provocative actions on the part of the US. In light of Russian facilitation of Syria’s eliminating its chemical weapons, it was repaying Russian help with aggression. It made clear that domestic US politics would not allow Obama and Kerry to open detente with Russia and complete and arms reduction deal by the end of Obama’s term. Once locked in that position, like most strange things that Obama has done, he persisted. It did nothing but escalate the domestic political furor until Obama (and Clinton) were so committed to confrontation with Russia that Trump saw and opening to flank that foreign policy on the left. And there are a bunch of lefties who were misled by Trump’s move; Trump does not intend to carry Putin’s water so much as to use his reasonableness on Russia to soften his absolute craziness on everything else.
Putin might play the claimed connection with Trump, but he’s a sharp enough political player to understand that Trump is not his BFF as has been alleged. As President, Trump would pivot to the military or there would be a serious constitutional crisis.
Westerners would have been better served by not acting like bullies (a Bush/Cheney specialty) and provoking Russian fear by abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The sucessful arms limitation talks subsequently did not completely walk that back. Westerners would have been better served if the Republican party’s obstruction of President Obama had not contained allegations of treason causing Obama to overemphasize his use of force in order to hold domestic legitimacy.
Putin doesn’t stir up Russian Orthodox nationalism. Several right-wing oligarchs have been at that for at least 20 years. But Putin does co-opt that nationalism and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church to enhance his authority. The only thing lacking for Putin to be a traditional Tsar is hereditary succession. He is a strong and forceful (in the use of force as well) leader because Russia when it was handed to him was close to being a failed state with chronic economic depression and the anger of people who had hoped the West would enable them to have a Western consumer lifestyle like happened in Germany after World War II. Instead, shock treatment capitalism allowing the theft of most former Soviet infrastructure into the hands of oligarchs drawn from the former nomenklatura. The Russian population’s distrust of the West (outside the cosmopolitan class) is rooted in what they perceive as betrayal at the end of the Cold War. Personalizing a national mood in Putin is missing his popular support for exactly what he is doing “Making Russia great again.”
I think John Pepper covers this history very well. It is actions and policy, not personal criticism that affect Putin’s response. And Americans need to better understand Russian interests and the history of those interests instead of rushing to judgement just because it’s Russia. American presidents also use nationalism among American citizens because it helps them crush dissent caused by their policy changes (or failure to change policies) and domestic assassinations of minorities and others classified as criminals. I so wish that US policies were not so that I had to write that last sentence. But the drone war, continuing of Guantanamo, suppression of Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter and silence in the face of the rise of white nationalism cannot be ignored.
There is much I agree with here. Yet, for example, asking us to directly equate domestic murders of investigative journalists and rival politicians with domestic killings of citizens by police simply fails to persuade me. This sort of statement reflects a worldview which I mistrust.
I’m with you that our democracy, and our policies, are not entirely healthy. But we are in the middle of a Presidential election which could be won by one candidate or the other, and the two candidates present wildly different policy prescriptions. There is nothing at all similar in the offing for Russian citizens.
George W. Bush said it best when he asked, “Is our GOP operatives learning?” Given their follow-through on the 2012 Latino outreach autopsy, the answer is a clear “No.” And as the defining credo of the 2016 silly season seems to be “Grifters gonna grift”, I doubt there’s anybody within the GOP apparatus whose concerns about GOTV are being heeded. Hell, they’re already pre-explaining their Nov 8 thrashing in terms of election-rigging, and if that doesn’t take, there’s always the cherished “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed” canard.
Sweet Jeebus, what a travesty: One of America’s political parties reduced to a series of boring slogans that belie ignorance, greed and blame-shifting as their core values. Heckuva job, Reincy!
I live, and vote, in Maine. Eliot Cutler (3rd candidate) has an entire boatload of guilt on his shoulders. Yes, he’s a reasonable guy, but to run a 3rd party candidacy (Twice!) when Lepage was running was just idiocy. This is the picture of 3rd party politics (Ralph Nader, I’m looking at you).
Think he’ll do it again? After all, third time’s the charm, eh?