Month: February 2018

[From the lofty discussion on a progressive blog, 473 days after her loss to Trump.]

Stupidity of the remarks are all her own making. After her triumph at the convention, Hillary opened a nine point lead. Was it arrogance of the moment, a warped feeling she’s closing in on her glass ceiling …

○ Hillary Clinton Was Politically Incorrect, but She Wasn’t Wrong About Trump’s Supporters | The Atlantic – Sept. 10, 2016 |
○ The Destruction of Hillary Clinton and Shattered review – was Trump’s victory inevitable? | The Guardian – May , 2017 |

Behind Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Line | ABC News – Sept. 8, 2016 |

This week Clinton’s campaign is shifting into a get-out-the-vote mode while she also maintains her sideline pursuit of poachable Republicans. Her team will continue touting prominent GOP endorsements: Former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman even introduced Clinton at multiple closed-door August fundraisers in California. There, the candidate explained her approach to Republicans interested in Trump, according to one Bay Area attendee. Clinton divides Trump voters into two baskets, she said: the everyday Republicans — her targets — and what she called “the deplorables” — the “alt-right” crowd she excoriates and has no hope of wooing. [Source: Politico – Sept. 4, 2016]  

More below the fold …

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer writing for Language Log, a blog hosted by the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, compared the phrase to “parade of horribles,” an expression that evolved from events in which early New Englanders dressed in garish costumes and sardonically marched through local towns.

 « click for more info »

In this case, the line appears to be an original creation of Clinton and her team, though the New York fundraiser was not the first time she used it.

In an interview with Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 2 on Sept. 8 — a day before the fundraiser — Clinton made an almost identical statement.

“I’d say you can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets,” Clinton said. “There are what I would call the deplorables — you know, the racists and the haters and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he’s going to restore an America that no longer exists.”

 

HRC presumed she was talking amongst her Israeli friends on that fatal September 8 in the interview with Channel 2. Unwittingly, she got back-stabbed by her “friends” in the Jewish community. We have covered them by name many times over …

On Israeli TV, Hillary makes the choice for Trump clearer than ever | The Jerusalem Post |

Ironically, as Clinton was speaking, Iranian military boats were provoking US warships in the Persian Gulf.

Because she has no record of achievement on Israel, her remarks to Yonit Levi, by necessity, focused on her criticism of Donald Trump. If there is still a line that can be crossed in American politics, she crossed it. Clinton accused a full half of Donald Trump’s supporters – roughly a quarter of the population of the United States – of being “deplorable.”

With no substantiation, she attributed to these unidentified people the ugliest of motives, from bigotry to misogyny to anti-Semitism. What a horrible thing to say about the nation she hopes to lead. The truth is that the fringe elements that support Trump are minuscule and unequivocally disavowed by the candidate. Clinton cannot say the same of the agitators on the Left who are rabidly anti-Israel and who form a core constituency within her campaign. In keeping with the Democrat playbook of the modern era, Clinton reflexively plays the “race card” whenever the questioning gets tough.

But of all the dumb things said by Clinton on Channel 2, her explanation for refusing to acknowledge the enmity of radical Islam takes the prize. Even though the word “Islamic” forms a part of the name of Islamic State, she won’t refer to Islamic terrorism by its name. Like her former boss, Barack Obama, she posits that identifying the enemy provides them with a means to recruit more terrorists. Perhaps if we just call them something else, maybe something flattering, we will have them on the run.

Can you imagine Winston Churchill or FDR refusing to identify the Nazis by name for fear of bolstering their recruiting? And yet in this world war of the 21st century, Clinton is falling right in line with the failed approach of Obama – the Neville Chamberlain of our time. Clinton even went so far as to say that jihadists are “praying” for Trump to win (as if she were privy to jihadi prayers). What complete nonsense.

Jihadists seek to impose Sharia law on the entire world and their greatest fear is someone like Trump – a leader who would seek the immediate destruction of ISIS with overwhelming force, not politically correct speech or psychological babble.

About the author David Friedman: The writer advised Donald Trump on US-Israel relations. He became U.S. Ambassador to Israel and triumphantly, with hardly a voice of criticism on a progressive blog, moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Someone who “lost it” after the election defeat by means of the crucial electoral college vote. Putting blame on “the Russians”, at least the IC ran with her line and created chaos in the aftermath. The Trump crooks and business associates have settled in the White House, alt-right representative Steve Bannon has been banned for the looks of it. Nevertheless, the deplorables are ruling America. Great state of affairs.

First principle when running for office of the wprld’s most powerful position: “Know thy enemy.”

 

[Update-1]

* [new] Re: BMW = Brexit Made Wonderful (4.00 / 2)

Trump won because he is/was a maverick, coming into politics sideways from a billionaire’s podium, a la Berlusconi.

His notoriety as a crook made him media red meat, they gobbled up every gaffe and vomited it back repeatedly creating a vortex and regaling him with millions of dollars free publicity. Hillary could not compete on this level at all, she was recycled old news. Old policies, reconstituted pablum, b-o-r-i-n-g.

She thought the answer was to buy fancier pantsuits and widen that rictus leer of delusional superiority.
Her femininity was supposed to be a big voter plus, but the bloodlust she showed around the manner of Ghaddaffi’s dying revealed a level of sadism that couldn’t be unseen, not exactly the kinder, gentler leader many would have affirmed her as, purely on her gender.

She placed herself right in the Madeline Albright hag-bag, hobnobbing with Kissinger just in case anyone had any illusions by then as to her true nature.
Her lust for war with Libya made her a whitebread Condoleeza on steroids.

The Republicans were on the ropes, all their candidates had the charisma of cold mashed potatoes, so when Trump showed up with his base of aggrieved, angry voters eager to see their reality show superhero drain the swamp -as if!- the Party saw voters and grabbed with both hands onto his coattails.

Similarly again to Berlusconi, people thought riches symbolised a crude wisdom that politicians were too poor and savvy-deficient to understand, and if politics was really all about money then why not get a successful businessman to run the country like a corporation?
Straight-shootin’, tuff-talking, the frisson of bad boy behaviour to grab ledes and shout soundbites.
Isn’t he awful? Tut-Tut.
What did he do today? Oh how shocking!

The more he hated on the media the more they lapped up their profitable punishment, like johns with their dominatrix.
Whip me! I love it! Harder? Yes! Talk dirty to me! OK you asked for it!
Gimme scandal, abuse, and alt-facts, gimme wannabe fascists, give me peace with Putin, give me Mexican walls, give me Hillary behind bars!

And so we got to know his temperament, slalom mood swings, rabid tweet-olalia, the sneering superiority failing to cover up the cry-for-help insecurity that boastful bragadocio was always really about. He defied credulity, our cosy myths about normality shattering as we watched his trajectory dominate the narrative.

Love me, fear me, but never forget me.

We watched his high wire act with sanity like passers-by watch a train wreck, rubbernecking at his antics, marvelling at how a man so clueless about anything could have the epic hubris to want to be POTUS.
No way, can’t happen, surely…

Yes way. We looked into the abyss with GWB, now with Trump the abyss is staring back -hard- at us.
The swamp is deeper than ever, the sheepskin off the wolf as we ponder what mayhem he can conjure before he self-combusts, and how many he will take with him when he does.

Bang or whimper? Time’ll tell. (Bigly).

‘The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.’ Thomas Piketty

by melo on Sat Mar 3rd, 2018

Ivanka Trump doesn’t necessarily support the idea of teachers bringing guns to school, but she thinks it needs to be discussed. That might be a diplomatic way to avoid outright disagreeing with her father, but she’s right that people should talk about it. They should talk about it not because it’s a sane or practical way to stop school shootings, but because it makes intuitive sense to a lot of people.

From the perspective of a would-be gunman, the more weapons in the schools, the more difficult their task. If they’re suicidal, which they usually are, then they won’t be worried about dying. But they might be worried about getting killed before they can carry out their plan. Would this ever be enough to make them choose the movie theater, outside concert, or shopping mall instead of a school? I think, conceivably, the answer to that is ‘yes.’ From the perspective of school safety, those other venues can work on their own plans for deterrence. Any plan that shifts shooters away from schools needs to be considered even if it has zero effect on the overall societal problem.

So, even if the deterrent effect is pretty weak, I can see how some would see it as better than the status quo. But making yourself a modestly less attractive target to a suicidal gunman has no necessary connection to making our kids safer on school grounds. Even if school shootings are increasingly common, they are still statistically rare. Someone bringing a gun to school is mostly a theoretical problem, which is how we should want things to remain. A solution that guarantees that multiple guns are brought to every school, every day, is going to ramp up the odds that a shooting will occur. Teachers can suffer from mental illness, too. They can have fits of rage. They can make mistakes and misplace a gun or fail to keep the storage site secure.

Another consideration is that many students, parents, and teachers would feel like this solution creates an unsafe learning or working environment. To implement this policy in the face of those concerns would be disrespectful and cause a large backlash. Irate parents would flood school board meetings, kids would be pulled out of public schools, and good teachers and administrators would retire.

Finally, teachers shouldn’t be hired or fired based on their ability to double as security officers. They would become primary targets for any shooters, and they’d still be individually outgunned in any likely firefight. Whether proficient with a weapon or not, they shouldn’t be diverted from their teaching duties to worrying about how to defend against an assault with a high-powered semiautomatic rifle. They shouldn’t be judged by their willingness or ability to confront someone who brings vastly more firepower to the confrontation. In military terms, this is no way to actually secure a campus.

I’ll admit that there’s a surface-level attractiveness to the idea. But the attraction vanishes once you scratch the surface a bit. We should discuss this idea, but only to make it clear why it’s a lazy unworkable plan based on magical thinking.

We can and should make our schools more secure, but this isn’t the way to do that.

So  I am in Indonesia for the next two months. I am leading a small team that will develop a retrospective study of the US Government’s last quarter century’s support for environmental and natural resource management in this country: the good, the bad and the meh. Lessons learned and where do we go from here.

We’re talking mainly about USAID but State has also made key contributions. And this period saw the end of the authoritarian rule of Suharto, a rapid and chaotic transition to decentralized democracy and a stabilization and rapid economic growth.

Unfortunately, all of this history has been a disaster for the environment. USAID’s (and other donors’) efforts have created a strong, professional government and, especially, non-governmental community of professionals. However, at the same time, mega-multinationals have been strip-mining Indonesia’s biodiversity and carbon-rich forests and its huge marine fisheries.  So, the environmental (and now climate change community) have been waging a steady but still losing war against unsustainable resource exploitation.

However, in the last few years, there has been big legal and shareholder pressure against this rampage and I think there may be “light at the end of the tunnel”. The stakes couldn’t be higher at this  point.

His numbers are bad but the president is still more popular than chlamydia, which is weird.

I have intended a diary on the topic for ages. I usually don’t have much in the way of spare time at my disposal, and don’t have spare time now, but as a primer on neoliberalism strikes me as one of the more useful things we could manage on a Democratic/Democratic-leaning blog, I thought I’d make some attempt. A bit more about my motivation and some recommended reading can be found below the fold.
My motivation: I am convinced that an honest discussion of neoliberal theory might be of some use. Regrettably, that is often not what happens on blogs like ours (or Daily Kos or elsewhere) or on social media. Neoliberal and neoliberalism are often used as pejorative terms, and I have learned the hard way that it is best not to trust the intentions of those who bandy about these words. Basically, even though I am not a political economist by any stretch of the imagination, I have read some of the very basic scholarly work (both critical and favorable) about neoliberalism and found most conversations about it on this blog frustrating for the reasons I mentioned before. My scholarly knowledge may be minimal, but it is just enough to suss out that “neoliberalism” is badly misused to the point of being rendered meaningless.

Regrettably, too much “knowledge” about the topic seems to come from opinion pieces in the popular press (as much as I may like to glance at the Guardian, at the end of the day, an opinion piece is merely an opinion piece and no more), and too often those opinion pieces do little more than muddy the waters. So when I see yet another comment that is just patently stupid (e.g., Candidate X is just another neoliberal – which is slightly more sophisticated than poopy-head, I suppose), my inclination is to dismiss whatever is being said as being offered in bad faith.

Now to the good stuff: I think a good starting point is this paper by Thorsen and Lie. This is the non-paywall version available as a pdf file. Thorsen would shortly complete his doctoral thesis on neoliberalism, and this work provided some of the basis for his doctoral work, as I understand it (I have not read his doctoral thesis as of this time). This paper seems to get cited quite a bit if Google Scholar is any indication, and the references at the end of the paper should give anyone interested a running start if they wish to delve into the scholarly research on the topic. The service Thorsen provides is his effort to come up with a neutral definition for a term that has, for better or (more likely worse) become highly emotionally loaded. Maybe neoliberalism amounts to a loose set of theories and concepts that espouse how our governments and the markets are related, and presumably one in which there would be an increased transfer of power from government to the private sector, a shift from thinking and acting in terms of political processes to economic processes, and a shift from legislative power to power elsewhere (perhaps the judiciary essentially “legislating”?). I highly recommend this paper, as Thorsen appears to be asking the right questions and appears fairly skeptical of the critical literature on the phenomenon. In the process, Thorsen asks a valuable question: do we really live in a neoliberal era, or are such claims a bit overstated? I don’t think he offers an absolute answer, but he does suggest some healthy skepticism.

One of the better critical books on the topic is David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. As the title suggests, it’s a quick read, and unlike a lot of academic writers, Harvey goes out of his way to be readable. Then again, David Harvey is a scholar who is perhaps as close to being the Carl Sagan of Das Kapital as any Marxist scholar might be (he actually posted a series of lectures on YouTube breaking down that complex tome into something more digestible). But I digress. You don’t have to be a Marxist to get something out of Harvey’s book, and as far as I’m concerned it might actually help if one is not. Thankfully, his intention appears to have been to write a scholarly book for a relatively broad audience. Keep in mind that he’s a Geographer by training, so his book is organized around a very geographic framework.

I’d start with Thorsen and Lie first, though, and then work backwards from there. Hopefully this particular diary is helpful to a few folks on this blog who have a genuine interest in the theory. I have a hunch that many of us have read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and although her work serves as a semi-useful entry point, it is not the end of the journey if we are genuinely interested in knowing more.

What’s the latest?

(Jsrtheta wrote the title of this post (slightly edited to fit above) in a comment on Booman’s post The Second Amendment is an Anachronism. It so reeked of white, middle class Dem elitism that I had to sit for a while and let my anger fade before I replied. Here is what I had to say:)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jsrtheta wrote:

Chicago is a wonderful city. Gun violence is pretty much confined to areas you wouldn’t go anyway.

And here we have the real essence of the white, middle class, middle-aged, elitist, entitlement-poisoned, middle-leftiness position that now screams all over this blog on every level.

A wonderful city for whom, jsrtheta? Go here and look at the demographic map of Chicago.(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#/media/File:African_American_Population_by_Census_Tract_in_Chicago,IL(2011).svg>) Obama’s city, currently ruled by his political hitman, Rahm Emanuel. Roughly 3 million in population, with vast tracts of areas where you wouldn’t go. But somebody has to live there, right? It looks to be roughly half the area of the city. 1.5 million people, maybe? Or even more, given the overcrowding in ghetto housing. And those “somebodies”…black and brown, mostly…all over the U.S. read people like you like a book.

The Dems currently seem to think that they can run the table in the 2020 presidential election by appealing to the “minority vote.” Yeah, right. Look at how well that worked out in 2016. They think that they’ll prop up some Dem hustler of color like Cory Booker (not necessarily even at the top of the ticket) as their proof of sincerity and sail into the White House. They oughta think again. The “minority vote” saw though the Democratic Party during Obama’s stay in the White House, and they’re not coming back. Not in numbers large enough to win. Bet on it. They’ll stay home rather than get hustled again.

Home…you know…in those “areas where you wouldn’t go anyway.”

Disgusting.

Gun violence is pretty much confined to areas you wouldn’t go anyway.

This should be the Dem’s 2020 slogan. Hell, it might even win them enough Trump voters to win.

Get real.

AG

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Cape May, New Jersey mansion.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have spent time painting the various planes of the roof. Note the lit and shadowed portions.  I’ve also started the siding on the left side.  Finally, I’ve added lines for the curb/sidewalk and the blurry structures on either side.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.  (Currently under reconstruction.)

Re: The Story of Stone, Manafort and Donald Trump (4.00 / 5)

The Bay of Pigs folks brought you Laotian heroin and the Iran-Contra affair before moving mujahideen into Azerbaijan and Chechnya to cause problems.
Rumsfeld and Cheney fought the Church Committee as Ford’s chiefs of staff before bringing you warrantless surveillance and the Iraq War.

Ollie Stone brought you Iran-Contra before bringing you (with Erik Prince) a private intelligence firm to serve Trump outside the chain of command.

Stone and Manafort got started with college politics in the 1970’s, got Reagan elected, and brought you Donald Trump.

If you don’t put a stake through their hearts, they do not stop.  

“Till the chains of your dreams are broken, no place in this world you can be.”- John Perry Barlow

by BooMan on Fri Feb 23rd, 2018 at 02:58:13 PM EST
[ Parent | Reply to This |   ]

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Not a Democrat mentioned.

No mention of guilt in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Not even the guilt of failing to “put a stake through their hearts.”

Lots of appreciation from the fans, though.

16 years of Democratic…Democratic what? Innocence?

Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much these days.

Like a true sword, the guilt cuts both ways.

Bet on it.

AG

P.S. However, Booman’s sig is right on the money:

Till the chains of your dreams are broken, no place in this world you can be.- John Perry Barlow

For those of you who have never figured out my own recent sig, It is simply another version of the same idea:

Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal-and betrayal into trust-can any human being become part of the truth. — Rumi

Break the chains of your dreams…including the dream that the Democratic Party is innocent of all blame regarding the current state of this country…and you will find yourself in a better world.

Until then?

You chasing a dream.

Bet on that as well.

(A paraphrase of the title of Oui’s recent post Only In a Fascist State Are Dissenters Hanged.)

Zeroed Out Again

Up to you, Booman.

It’s your blog.

Gonna stand up or lie down?

It’s up to you…

AG