Here's a quick look at some of that "weak messaging" by the Dems.
I can ask you to listen. I can insist on it. But I can't hear it for you.
Pretty obnoxious the GOP thinks workers should be weak-kneed with gratitude for corporations giving them pennies while pocketing a multi-billion dollar tax break stolen from the future of the middle class. #GOPTaxScampic.twitter.com/ulLIexUf4q
And she's no hero - unless by "hero", you mean somebody who's been doing the job for 40 years in spite of constantly coming under withering fire - often from her own side - and in the most horrific circumstances any of us will ever experience outside of our worst nightmares. Like this:
To discuss how Hillary Clinton HAS TO GO AWAY we turn to our panel of John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and via satellite, Al Gore. Also weighing in will be Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, and Jeb Bush.
Lili Loofbourow, The Week: "Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.
Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.
It's a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you're asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort. - and - The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is just how men are, and how sex is. - and then -
This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role "nature" must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you'll watch men get defensive, react, and "fight back."
This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he's being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to "understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman" thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn't bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative. Andrew Sullivan? Really? I suspect he knows a thing or two about himself as a man, but his opinion on how men and women act and react in physically intimate encounters is not to be taken too seriously. I could dismiss it just on the dubious merits of Man-Splaining, but throw in Gay-Splaining and you've kinda lost me altogether. Maybe that's partly why Ms Loofbourow includes his perspective - to illustrate the problem of disconnection(?) - but I'm not sure it doesn't just cloud the really solid points she's making. It could also be that I've chosen that particular nit to pick; and that could be not much more than my imagining the world to be a better place without Mr Sullivan in it.
Anyway, getting at the gist of it:
..."Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched."
If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?
The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain. If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?
The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.
- and -
I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.
But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.
Note to self: Be aware. See her for who she is. Appreciate it, and tell her about it.
It's not a football game. We can take no pleasure in bringing down a president, because what we're doing is some pretty serious business. But holy fuck, it's going to be cause for a feeling of great satisfaction when 45* - and hopefully, the bulk of the Radical GOP - are stomped back into the dung heap "conservatives" have been sprouting from for a solid 30 years. And I fully intend to celebrate to a near-blackout kind of excess. Not because "Blue Team Wins", but because we're done with the first thing on a very long list. Like the man said: It's not the beginning of the end - we still have a very long way to go - but maybe we can think of it as the end of the beginning.
You've heard it before, and here it is again: Of all the wealth generated in the world last year, 82% of it went to the Top 1%. None of it - NONE OF IT - went to the bottom 50%.
And there's a very good rundown of what's been happening in the Mueller investigation, and the bit about the use of bots and American social media.*
(I think this guy's conclusions are a bit silly, because we know that moving even a low percentage of voters makes a huge difference) Here's the study Abstract:
Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tenden- cies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news web- sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web- sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers. Happy Friday!
They could just be hedging their bets, but when DumFux News almost directly countervails their own prime time commentators, I have to think there's something more to it than that. Like maybe they understand how wacky they've made some of their viewers, and how dangerous it is to throw just a few too many signals out to the Lone Wolf cray-zoids - like the freak who threatened CNN.
.@DonLemon: There's "nothing random" about the arrest of a Michigan man who threatened to kill CNN employees. "This is what happens when the President of the United States repeatedly attacks members of the press simply for reporting facts he does not like" https://t.co/b7oXT900iO
Vox: Fox News just published a story that directly cuts against a conspiracy theory being pushed by the network’s television hosts, congressional Republicans, and the president himself.
Yes, that Fox News.
For the past few days, Fox News has been featuring wall-to-wall coverage of an unknown number of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page that had disappeared from FBI server records. Previous Strzok and Page messages had included a number of vitriolic comments about President Trump — even a reference to an “insurance policy” against his election.
So the missing texts were taken by the White House, pro-Trump Republicans in Congress, and many in the conservative media as proof that the FBI was covering up a vast anti-Trump conspiracy at the bureau.
“This is like Watergate but far worse,” Sean Hannity said on his Monday night Fox show. “This reeks of law-breaking, it reeks of conspiracy, and it reeks of obstruction of justice.”
Yet on Wednesday afternoon, Fox published an article on its website by reporter Jake Gibson, saying this theory was flatly wrong. Gibson writes, citing “federal law enforcement officials,” that the messages were deleted by a technical error, not malice — one that had affected not just Strzok and Page’s phones, but “thousands” of Bureau-issued devices between the dates of December 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017.
“The gap in records covered a crucial period, raising suspicion among GOP lawmakers as to how those messages disappeared,” Gibson writes. “But Fox News is told that the glitch affected the phones of ‘nearly’ 10 percent of the FBI’s 35,000 employees.”
We report, you decide. Or maybe we could call it Fox-on-Fox Violence(?) Anyway, it's another very strong indication that we've got some serious Daddy State bullshit goin' on - and maybe the Press Poodles in legitimate media are finally wising up and taking it to heart. But also too, 45* still approaches this like it's all part of the show. He phonies up a villain; he stages a confrontation; he waits to see how the audience reacts; then he adjusts the script (which includes changing facts and flat-out making shit up) to maintain the tension - and to tease whatever cliff-hanger he's ginned up this time around - so the hero (him, of course) always comes out on top.
It's axiomatic that if you stay in it long enough, show biz will make you crazy - fingers in your mouth, jumping up and down crazy.
45*'s trick is that he's using everything at his disposal to make us think we're the crazy ones (standard gaslighting tactics) - and more than that - he's convinced his "base" that they're the only sane ones, and that they can only stay sane by going along with whatever weird shit he comes up with next.
Cult45 - and that kinda explains why the Evangelicals feel so much at home with his malarkey, don't it.
The U.S. has also dropped significantly in the U.S. News rankings of trustworthiness and political stability. The greatest U.S. decline was in rankings of countries having open travel policies, likely related to Trump’s attempts to block visitors to the U.S. via the travel ban.
They're not Christians - they're Christianists. Right Radical TheoCons. They care for nothing but their Daddy State political agenda of gaining the power to Control & Oppress.
Politico: Evangelical Christians, says Perkins, “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”
What happened to turning the other cheek? I ask.
“You know, you only have two cheeks,” Perkins says. “Look, Christianity is not all about being a welcome mat which people can just stomp their feet on.” Matthew 15:8-9 The Message
3-9: But Jesus put it right back on them. “Why do you use your rules to play fast and loose with God’s commands? God clearly says, ‘Respect your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.’ But you weasel around that by saying, ‘Whoever wants to, can say to father and mother, What I owed to you I’ve given to God.’ That can hardly be called respecting a parent. You cancel God’s command by your rules. Frauds! Isaiah’s prophecy of you hit the bull’s-eye:
These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their heart isn’t in it. They act like they’re worshiping me, but they don’t mean it. They just use me as a cover for teaching whatever suits their fancy.”
