[Discussion] What comes next? Liber-all

American liberals and progressives now face their biggest challenge in a generation: What do we do with 4 years of a trump presidency, a republican congress, a likely conservative supreme court and most states under complete republican control?

This thread is not meant as a forum for discussing HOW or WHY democrats got destroyed in the 2016 election. It's meant for finding a way forward.

muraii wrote:
ruhk wrote:

Eh. I was fully aware of the Cascadia Subduction Fault when I moved here. I’d rather live somewhere I love and potentially die horribly in a natural disaster than live to an old age in some boring hellhole in the Midwest.

Ohio Welcomes You!

Ha ha I spent two weeks in Cleveland for a business trip several years ago and, apologies to anyone who lives there currently, it was literally the worst place I’ve ever been. I’ll stay here in the PNW.

Personally, if I could pick any place in the U.S. to live, it would probably be inside the giraffe barn at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado.

Outside of the U.S., perhaps the giraffe barn at Port Lympne. And as an extra bonus, no more worries about health care.

It's not the weather that sets the standards...it's giraffes!

ruhk wrote:

Ha ha I spent two weeks in Cleveland for a business trip several years ago and, apologies to anyone who lives there currently, it was literally the worst place I’ve ever been. I’ll stay here in the PNW. ;)

My first thought on reading this was "jesus christ you need to travel more".

I mean, look, my wife's from the Cleve, and all my in-laws are still there. But "worst place in the world" just shows a lack of imagination. Cleveland's really not that bad (weather aside), it's biggest crime is blandness.

Jonman wrote:
ruhk wrote:

Ha ha I spent two weeks in Cleveland for a business trip several years ago and, apologies to anyone who lives there currently, it was literally the worst place I’ve ever been. I’ll stay here in the PNW. ;)

My first thought on reading this was "jesus christ you need to travel more".

I mean, look, my wife's from the Cleve, and all my in-laws are still there. But "worst place in the world" just shows a lack of imagination. Cleveland's really not that bad (weather aside), it's biggest crime is blandness.

Didn’t say it was worst place in the world, just worst place I had been, primarily because of the blandness (and whatever that smell is). I’ve been to places with worse aspects, but they usually made up for it by being interesting or at least entertaining in other ways. Cleveland just had nothing going for it.
Once again, apologies to anyone who lives there.

ruhk wrote:

Didn’t say it was worst place in the world, just worst place I had been, primarily because of the blandness (and whatever that smell is). I’ve been to places with worse aspects, but they usually made up for it by being interesting or at least entertaining in other ways. Cleveland just had nothing going for it.
Once again, apologies to anyone who lives there.

I don’t have the opportunity to travel much. I do get to see and smell Los Angeles at varried times of day and night. What I thought was the smell of human dookies turns out to be a huge meat packing facility. I actually believed the smell was from homeless people’s public defecations.

Nothing beats NYC's pungent bouquet of urine and rotting garbage, especially in the summer.

Wealthy Dems and their backers hate Bernie (and Warren) for the same reason they hated Kucinich: he wants to tax the rich

The wealthy and their captured lawmakers smear anyone who offers a progressive alternative as a "spoiler" who will "undermine" the party's chances to beat Republicans; this becomes a critique of the politicians, who are characterized as "narcissists" whose presidential bids are a matter of ego, not policy. This also conveniently switches the discussion away from the policies themselves, refocusing it on personalities, which are then smeared again.

As Adam Johnson writes in FAIR, the press amplifies this tactic by calling the 1% and their enablers "mainstream Democrats" -- despite the fact that polls show 78% of Democrats holding a favorable view of Sanders, who also leads every poll on 2020 nominees, and whose polls also show that Sanders can beat Trump.

The insistence that a handful of millionaires and some Congressional lifers who've enriched them are the "mainstream" of the party only makes sense if you take the voters for granted, assuming that they'll vote for whomever the Democrats put on the ballot.

But voters care about substance, which is why I'm so bullish on Elizabeth Warren: as Doug Henwood writes in Jacobin, Warren has the policy details that we've been waiting for. Specific, excellent proposals, on gouging pharma companies, a Piketty-style wealth-tax, breaking up Big Tech monopolists, Right to Repair, and holding execs criminally liable for scams and breaches. Warren's not perfect, but she's a damned sight better than any of the corporatist tools embraced by the party establishment.

Holding execs criminally liable is big for me. I think its probably one of the only tools we can get to actually make any kind of difference in how companies treat us.

NathanialG wrote:

Holding execs criminally liable is big for me. I think its probably one of the only tools we can get to actually make any kind of difference in how companies* treat us.

*Also politicians, since they regularly are execs or regularly appoint execs into offices which dictate our daily lives.

I’ve been hearing about a potential strategy to unite righties and lefties by identifying the financial elite as the real enemy of the people. I would love to see something like that work.

RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been hearing about a potential strategy to unite righties and lefties by identifying the financial elite as the real enemy of the people. I would love to see something like that work.

Buwahahaha have you seen who owns pretty much everything??

Besides the underlying racism would never let the masses figure out that they are getting played.

RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been hearing about a potential strategy to unite righties and lefties by identifying the financial elite as the real enemy of the people. I would love to see something like that work.

That will never work coming from political parties. That would have to come from on the ground labor organizing.

DSGamer wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been hearing about a potential strategy to unite righties and lefties by identifying the financial elite as the real enemy of the people. I would love to see something like that work.

That will never work coming from political parties. That would have to come from on the ground labor organizing.

Oh yes. Absolutely. It would have to be entirely grass roots in origin. Which causes part of me to believe that it’s possible, and another part of me to believe that Alex Jones would attack it harder than pizza gate.

RawkGWJ wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
RawkGWJ wrote:

I’ve been hearing about a potential strategy to unite righties and lefties by identifying the financial elite as the real enemy of the people. I would love to see something like that work.

That will never work coming from political parties. That would have to come from on the ground labor organizing.

Oh yes. Absolutely. It would have to be entirely grass roots in origin. Which causes part of me to believe that it’s possible, and another part of me to believe that Alex Jones would attack it harder than pizza gate.

Naturally anyone on the right is completely about fabricating the lie of being about average Americans.

'Knock Down the House' puts AOC's stunning victory in larger context

By providing a ground-floor seat to the start of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon, "Knock Down the House" feels like an extended window into a moment in history. That fortuitous twist, however, risks overshadowing the documentary's larger message, which essentially serves as a rallying cry to brave elected politics, emphasizing that AOC is the notable exception, not the rule.

Directed and co-written by Rachel Lears, the movie -- which sold to Netflix for a reported $10 million at the Sundance Film Festival -- meticulously chronicles several Democratic activists mounting challenges to well-established incumbents.

I own the Red Hen restaurant that asked Sarah Sanders to leave. Resistance isn’t futile

‘‘Hello Intolerant, intellectually-challenged, psychotic, socialists!

Your so-called business is in jeopardy. Rest assured this is not a threat but simply a warning that predicts your downfall. . . . When your treasonist hypocrite lowlife Obama took our nation into despair (for 8 yrs) we didn’t do or say the things you do. Get over it, before it’s too late! BTW, there are a lot more of us than there are of you.’’

I’ve been getting hate mail for almost a year now, ever since I asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to leave my Lexington, Va., restaurant, the Red Hen, last June.

At the time, the country was in turmoil over the Trump administration’s heinous practice of separating children from their parents at our southern border. In our tiny 26-seat restaurant, the horror felt simultaneously immediate and far away.

Faced with the prospect of serving a fine meal to a person whose actions in the service of our country we felt violated basic standards of humanity, we balked. We couldn’t do it.

I took Ms. Sanders aside and politely suggested she leave. She agreed, equally politely. She may or may not have expected this day would come, but she never showed any sign of outrage, or even much surprise. We’d drawn a line; she’d accepted it.

I’m pretty sure both of us thought that was the end of the matter.

When I awoke the next morning, social media was on fire. The incident had gone from a Facebook post to a tagged tweet to nationally trending news with the whoosh of lighter fluid to a flame.

The blowback was swift and aggressive. Within 24 hours, the restaurant’s phone line was hacked, my staff and I were doxxed, and threats to our lives and families and property were pouring in through every available channel. Protesters colonized the streets around the restaurant. Thousands of fake Yelp reviews torpedoed our ratings, and dozens of people attempted to lock up our tables with reservations they had no intention of honoring. Pundits lamented the prospect of “red restaurants” and “blue restaurants.” In less than three days, President Trump had mocked us on Twitter.

In the days following, I tried to balance fears for the safety of my family and staff against the reality of being well-protected in a small, loving community. Overhanging it all was a sense that I’d seen this show before; don’t we all have ringside seats to the outrage circus these days? But there was plenty I couldn’t predict or assess: How likely was it, really, that the guy texting me from a Minneapolis area code was really going to come to town to set fire to our restaurant? It felt impossible to know.

When the mail started pouring in, things got weirder. For the first few days the rubber-banded bundles fit into my letter carrier’s shoulder bag. But soon he was forced to heft large white plastic totes overflowing with letters and packages up to my door.

Staring at it all made my stomach clench. It’s one thing to set filters on your email, reset your privacy settings on Instagram and block callers on your phone. It’s a whole different feeling to face a mountain of mail dwarfing your living-room sofa, not knowing which contain abuse (or worse) and which appreciation.

The realness of that mail struck me. Paper correspondence carries all the marks of genuine humans, people who feel strongly enough about the whole event that they take on all those little tasks of letter writing — tracking down paper or card, composing their thoughts, handwriting or printing it out, locating our address and getting it into the mail.

In more than 4,000 painstakingly typed letters, hastily scrawled postcards, and feces-smeared notebook pages, I was branded a racist, a bigot and a hypocrite. A victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I was an idiot, or worse, and a lousy manager. Sure, I’d 86’d Sanders, but it was my business that was going down the drain.

Yet, as I kept opening the letters, I saw a pattern. For every hateful message, there was one of gratitude. For every angry accusation that our actions were driven by the inability to accept Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, there was a note of thanks from someone lamenting Trump’s rollback of protections for marginalized people. What’s more, for every wish that our business die a painful death, there was a dollar bill or a generous check or an order for a gift certificate.

When we opened after a 10-day hiatus, our dining room was full. In the following weeks, people who had never been to the Shenandoah Valley traveled out of their way to eat with us. Hundreds of orders for our Red Hen spice blend poured in. And the love spread far beyond our door, as supporters sent thousands of dollars’ in donations in our honor to our local food pantry, our domestic violence shelter and first responders.

After nearly a year, I’m happy to say that business is still good. Better than good, actually. And besides the boost to our area charities, our town’s hospitality and sales revenue have gone up, too.

Our haters may have believed that there were more of “them” than of “us,” but it turns out we have more than enough to keep us cooking. And to everyone who might be fearful about taking a stand, I say don’t be. Resistance is not futile, for you or your business.

Wonderful.

VA vacation is next month. I'm planning on swinging by.

You mean your VAcation?

Yeah, I'll see myself out. Is this the door?

oilypenguin wrote:

VA vacation is next month. I'm planning on swinging by.

I can make recommendations in the Northern VA area near the beltway.

Mixolyde wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

VA vacation is next month. I'm planning on swinging by.

I can make recommendations in the Northern VA area near the beltway.

Thanks, I may take you up on that. We've gone to Chincoteague Island for a week the last few years but we're running out of stuff to do in that area and we'll be branching out a bit more. That said, if the address I have for the Red Hen is right, that might be too far out of the way. We'll see.

In other related news, Americans are racist as sh*t.

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/6h5mwFWQTmTudOGGdakZwEvd9qoHGEbdqJc3OEmecQHfIbLbzOdyH6fXpfgaOczFsbWMjXrYlxUptheMBBglM9nbMxNYiQcnVvqZ94Zeb9-XR6Xy7pcfExydc0bNXe8eSoOaJsHeta8fDWSYhEUN3WZK4XeGtSt-c3qEnrX07ZM9szIAPxKlfc_ORBmWyaYf3wRLr24OmzgzRqD-pVDrWzOZ7GabgccjbrslnMOMk6klJ0_afQMUCXFDnEHRm8CqUCvHKqOAcjMux3edaqY3OfT2Y8iqtUfoIErgkrJQUr8qbYSsthsox7bFYCf32VKURUKeN_TBXua90zHHGxrGFyDe0c_K-AsRMuqfLHlqJBRsUnfSws3CPJLF9dF7C2JhwUYZd7QuJ8PdLYRvjeo1wvj4CkwJQIayC_2Cx4gExn4l6MAyUjbJH8kjxtsh7vtL73r-f0Q2c5s31zPWvAJVS1c78eSQH4xQcXA5HQBhrR97CMnwrPGHK4U3XZ27VDT8CTb_KT0JwwYFumK02Jh885JGRbFSZqtZMBDp3Lji6z3qnmClQfnn_VfH5XS1XG64NDPgZPHf2vKxcpXHyroOyoi-OsXQltJv2NclLBHHJLdj_V0gOxYF37sggzeKlT54jFD_n1XKl4_tj2FJoA175-Fl_VlkUNY=w650-h711-no)

An open letter to St. Louis suburban moms about the legislative session

Dear St. Louis Suburban Mom,

As you know, you're kind of a big deal, perhaps the most important demographic in American elections these days. When our party, the Republican Party, got its hat handed to us nationally in the last midterms, it was suburban moms like you who really did us damage.

Well, not you, specifically. You still mostly voted for Congressman Ann Wagner. Thanks for that. But she's nervous enough about 2020 that she's started up a suburban caucus. That's how important you are.

In light of that, we thought we'd explain to you what an incredible job we did standing up for you in the recently completed session of the Missouri Legislature.

First off, and this is really important: We didn't raise your taxes. As you save to send your children to college, it's important to us to allow you to spend your hard-earned money the way you want to. Of course, that doesn't mean college isn't going to get more expensive. Because we are so committed to never, ever raising taxes, Missouri is among the lowest funded higher education systems in the country. And that's why the Board of Curators of the University of Missouri voted to raise tuition 5 percent starting next year. Some might call that a back-door tax increase. Not us.

Speaking of college, if you are sending your daughter to a university in the state — public or private — we want you to know about our efforts to change the federal Title IX regulations meant to protect her from sexual assault or discrimination. We fell just short in our effort to gut those Obama-era regulations this year, but rest assured, we'll be back at it next year.

Keep in mind, the university folks, and various women's advocacy groups, will tell your daughter that our efforts would have made it less likely that she would report a sexual assault during her time in school. And this is likely true. But think about the other side of this. Too many of the sons of your wealthier neighbors are facing the unintended consequences of such protections. Some of them had to switch universities just because they are no longer allowed to, as conservative commentator Stephen Moore put it, do “stupid things” and “chase skirts.” Can you imagine the horror of having to face your friends at the country club and have to tell them Young Tanner ended up transferring to Vatterott College from Washington University?

We've got those boys' backs and want you to know we'll be fighting for them again next legislative session.

While we fell a little short there, here's where we were really successful. Missouri passed one of the most severe abortion bans in the country. That means that if your daughter does happen to get pregnant after she gets raped on campus, we've assured that she has to carry the rapist's baby to full term.

We're sure you recall several years back when our party wasn't fully committed to such a pro-life position. That was during the Todd Akin days, when, as you'll recall, many of you ended up voting for Democrat Claire McCaskill for Senate because of Akin's unfortunate “legitimate rape” comments. Trust us, we're past that. We've moved on to “consensual rape,” like what happens when the frat boy is out sowing his wild oats. Of course, such rapes can lead to babies, and now, we're going to protect those babies.

When that baby is born, likely after your daughter drops out of school, of course, we want to be sure to continue to protect your hard earned tax dollars.

That's why we've made sure that tens of thousands of Missouri children, most of them poor, no longer have access to Medicaid. Once again, this is an area where Missouri is leading the nation. You can thank the Missouri Republican Party for that.

Here's another area where we stand out: If your daughter, after dropping out of college and giving birth to her rapist's baby, turns to a life of drugs, such as opioids, Missouri will protect her personal health information better than any state in the nation.

You see, every other state has a law that will stop your daughter from doctor shopping to find the drugs she has become addicted to. To accomplish that, they have created prescription drug monitoring programs that allow medical professionals and some law enforcement agencies to have access to your daughter's health information.

Thanks to the Missouri Republican Party, Missouri is the only state in the nation that doesn't have such a database. We're proud of that. We value your freedom too much to spend any taxpayer dollars on protecting the life of your daughter, or her baby, once he or she is born, of course.

Freedom and fetuses. That's what we're about.

Vote for us in 2020.

Thank you,

Missouri Republican Party

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D71G920WwAEXVXF.png)

Damn that Jill Stein and Susan Sarandon forcing those voters to stay home!

Huh. It's almost like there was a concerted effort by an outside actor to depress the vote.

OG_slinger wrote:

Nothing beats NYC's pungent bouquet of urine and rotting garbage, especially in the summer.

Hey, I resemble that comment! At least it's an organic bouquet.

NYMag: Democratic Leaders’ Reluctance to Wage Kavanaugh Fight Looks Even Worse Today

When Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterms, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hailed it as a triumph of Democratic strategy. “Having a Democratic House puts our caucus in a much better position when it comes to both holding the president accountable and getting things done,” Schumer, who lost three Democratic seats in his own chamber, told Politico. “As in the last two years, the secret to our success will be unity.”

Despite this lofty talk from Schumer, divisions in the party were on full display just months earlier; after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on July 9, 2018, liberal activists found Democratic leaders in the Senate were reluctant to join them in waging all-out war. Of course, Senate Democrats were forced to reconsider when it emerged that Christine Blasey Ford had credibly accused the judge of attempting to rape her when they were teenagers. Fresh reporting in Ryan Grim’s new book, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement, sheds more light on Senate Democrats’ tactics during the Kavanaugh hearings and suggests that at this pivotal moment, leaders treated their energized base more like a threat than an asset.

Grim reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein failed to act on a letter from Blasey Ford, her constituent, for weeks, despite pressure from fellow California senator Kamala Harris. The office of Representative Anna Eshoo forwarded the letter, which described her allegation against Kavanaugh, to Feinstein on July 30. However, it only became public in mid-September, after Grim reported on its existence in The Intercept. In his book, Grim casts doubt on Feinstein’s explanation for the delay — that Blasey Ford had requested anonymity — noting that her argument “ignored that Blasey Ford had already taken repeated steps to come forward, had already told friends she planned to do so, had already come forward to two congressional offices and reached out to the press, and was only asking for confidentiality until she and Feinstein spoke.”

Blasey Ford’s letter didn’t just contain information that could jeopardize the nomination of a man who posed a threat to Roe v. Wade. Its very existence implied some moral obligation on the part of its recipients: Blasey Ford wrote the letter, and initially contacted Eshoo, because she wanted to be heard. If Feinstein understood Blasey Ford’s intentions, why did she hesitate to reveal the letter? Grim offers an answer, reinforced by contemporaneous reporting from The New Yorker. Feinstein, the magazine reported, believed her party “would be better off focusing on legal, rather than personal, issues in their questioning of Kavanaugh.” There are other, more cynical possibilities for her delay. The senator also faced a challenge to her reelection bid: Fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon was running against her from the left. As Grim notes, Feinstein needed conservative votes to shore up her lead in the state’s general election. A combative posture toward Kavanaugh didn’t exactly serve her interests

All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All

Hickenlooper later explained that while he might personally not be so down on the Green New Deal and other policies put forward by the Democratic Socialist wing of the party, he was worried that "Republicans will make it seem like socialism."

Because apparently Hickenlooper thinks that the job of Democrats is to make Republicans comfortable.

strangederby wrote:

All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All

Hickenlooper later explained that while he might personally not be so down on the Green New Deal and other policies put forward by the Democratic Socialist wing of the party, he was worried that "Republicans will make it seem like socialism."

Because apparently Hickenlooper thinks that the job of Democrats is to make Republicans comfortable.

Good!

This Stockholm Syndrome is so frustrating. Under which rock where they living the past 10 years? If there's no dirt, they will invent it (see: birtherism); if there maybe is some dirt than they still make up and believe a story about a pedophile ring being operated in a cellar of a building that has no cellar!

Newsflash: Republicans will hate your guts, and will believe anything to justify it. So maybe put the priorities of the sane people first?