Last week was another exhausting one. I was feeling worn out and despondent at times.
And then I watched some videos about the civil rights movement and it totally changed my perspective. I felt inspired and humbled.
There are days when his tweeting, and lying, and disdain for the separation of powers, exhaust and depress me. But watching people beaten in the streets and little girls spit on for going to school and hoards of hooded white people burning crosses and murdering heroes made me realize a few things.
First, America has seen horrible awful times before. Second, we have always, always, always as a nation had to fight against those who don’t care about their fellow man. Third, our struggle pales when compared to what our righteous foreparents went through for our country. And finally, we owe it to every single one of those people who bled, and struggled, and died for equality to do all we can to stop backsliding.
The good news is the same as it always is: we have lots and lots of allies working to save our democracy. The legal news for Trump is going to come whether he wants it or not. With lots of hard work, the midterms can bring us good news.
We are living through hard times, but don’t romanticize the past. America has lived through awful times before. There have been people pushing against equality and love since day one. We just need to keep fighting our battle for democracy, equality, freedom, justice, and love.
And any student of history will tell you that the moral arc of history bends towards justice.
And we are the ones that bend that arc. Our first step is in November. Keep your eyes on that prize and hold on. Midterms are won with enthusiasm and hard work.
Keep faith. Keep working. Be kind to one another. ❤️
The Wheels Are Coming Off the Trump Train
Trump’s land of delusion: Disregard the sycophants; the wheels are coming off, if they were ever on
Bluffers bluff, and President Trump just tried to bluff his way through one of the worst weeks of his administration.
It's not working. Donald Trump is a terrible poker player. His tells are so clumsily obvious and that we mistakenly give him credit for guile where none exists, and for some cinematic, supervillain cunning where there is only a howling, feral mass of insecurity and need.
Maintaining the Trump illusion requires an endless suspension of disbelief; denying facts, logic, reason, the law and the utterly evident cluster-you-know-what that this administration represents.
The central unspinnable story of the past week is the one over which Trump feels the most pressing anxiety. Three new stories reported on Michael Cohen's latest avenues of legal jeopardy, all of which increase the risk Cohen flips on Trump to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
We can be dragged down into Trump's wilderness of mirrors , or we can take a deep breath and appreciate just how truly terrible his week was. With Trump, it's always the worst week, since the last week.
At least next week is Infrastructure Week. We'll always have Infrastructure Week.
Giuliani Admits ‘Spygate’ Is PR in Anticipation of Impeachment
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed on Sunday that the president and his allies’ attempts to discredit the Mueller investigation — including the most recent so-called Spygate controversy — are part of a public relations campaign aimed at staving off impeachment. “It is for public opinion,” the former New York mayor admitted during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. And while trying to shape public opinion is the rarely acknowledged goal of any presidential administration, what Giuliani said next was unique to Trump’s: “Because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.”
Think about what he just admitted — they are just playing a public relations game with all this AND they realize that impeachment is a likely outcome of this process.
I know it feels like they are winning the PR game, but remember that the other sides hasn’t even played its hand. Mueller is keeping his cards secret for now. When the truth comes out, more people will have to admit the truth.
Also important to keep in mind:
Our Presidential Politics Have Always Been Nasty. President Trump Is Something New.
The negativity, hostility and incivility of the Trump presidency makes it easy to say that he, and he alone, has degraded American political discourse and this coarseness has, thereby, endangered our nation and our democracy. But saying that is to both miss the point and give him too much credit.
We romanticize and misremember our past, creating a mythology that is more Hollywood than real, when we assume a golden age of civility in American political life. As most American historians know, politics has always been a competitive sport and American presidents have always expressed crude and often negative opinions about opponents. The difference between then and now is that they usually kept these thoughts and sayings private. We can hear them voice these thoughts to aides, colleagues, and staff in the White House tapes of JFK, LBJ and Nixon. But, they were careful to keep those thoughts out of the public realm (and their White House staffs rarely leaked), and to speak publicly in what could be best called a presidential voice. There was, in a sense a difference between the public and private sphere of being president.
So other presidents were bad as well. they just had filters and common sense.
The article seems to argue that this coarseness may very well be the new norm given the lack of privacy in public life. But I disagree. I think after this mess, Americans will want someone who has the gravitas and honesty that we value in our presidents. This is a country in which we raise children with a myth about our first president being so unable to lie, that he told his dad about chopping down his cherry tree.
That desire for a president who is a good, honest, role model is in our national DNA. I truly believe that after Trump the pendulum will swing back the other way. Americans want a leader we can trust. We want a leader we can look up to.
I do agree with the article that there will be a tipping point of Trump behavior. After all, despite his 42% approval, only 13% find him honest.
Will one insult finally be the line in the sand that Americans will not accept him crossing? Is a moment coming similar to when chief counsel for the army Joseph N. Welsh confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy (advised by future Trump adviser Roy Cohn) with the line: "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” and thereby loosened the grip of McCarthyism on the U.S.
He states this as a question and it is a good one. I think the answer is yes. I think this will happen. If I were to put money on it, I would guess that when the reports finally come out from all these investigations, Trump will go even uglier and it will be a step too far for the majority of Americans.
Good Election News
Democrats Are Running a Smart, Populist Campaign
Stacey Abrams and Conor Lamb are supposed to represent opposite poles of the Trump-era Democratic Party. She is the new progressive heroine — the first black woman to win a major-party nomination for governor, who will need a surge of liberal turnout to win Georgia. He is the new centrist hero — the white former Marine who flipped a Western Pennsylvania congressional district with support from gun-loving, abortion-opposing Trump voters.
But when you spend a little time listening to both Abrams and Lamb, you notice something that doesn’t fit the storyline: They sound a lot alike.
The lesson here isn’t just about these two candidates. Dozens of other Democratic candidates also sound like Abrams and Lamb. The lesson is that Democrats are more united than many people realize — and are running a pretty smart midterm campaign.
Yes, there are some tensions on the political left. But these tensions — over Obama-style incrementalism vs. Bernie-style purism, over the wisdom of talking about impeachment, over whether to woo or write off the white working class — are most intense among people who write and tweet about politics. Among Democrats running for office, the tensions are somewhere between mild and nonexistent.
Democratic candidates aren’t obsessed with President Trump, and they aren’t giving up on the white working class as irredeemably racist. They are running pocketbook campaigns that blast Republicans for trying to take health insurance from the middle class while bestowing tax cuts on the rich (charges that have the benefit of being true).
Millennials take on Trump in the midterms
Allred — the newly minted Democratic nominee for a competitive House seat here— is part of a swell of young Democratic House candidates hoping to inspire higher turnout among fellow millennials in the midterm elections, when youth voting rates typically decline. At least 20 millennial Democratic candidates are running in battleground districts, a leap over previous cycles that could remake the party’s generational divide.
“I don’t recall a cycle with anything close to this number of younger candidates in recent times,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Notably, younger candidates who actually have a good shot at winning – raising money, running professional campaigns.”
Nunes feels Russia probe blowback at home
Devin Nunes, the California congressman whose allegiance to Donald Trump has made him public enemy number one to many Democrats, is beginning to feel the heat back home.
His little-known challenger is awash in cash from across the country as a result of Nunes’ polarizing role in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. An independent expenditure campaign has posted hostile billboards along Highway 99, the heavily traveled main road through Nunes’ Central Valley district.
Budget battle brews as Trump threatens another shutdown
Trump has warned Congress that he will never sign another foot-tall, $1 trillion-plus government-wide spending bill like the one he did in March. His message to lawmakers in both parties: Get your act together before the next budget lands on my desk.
The worst-case scenario? A government shutdown just a month before Election Day, Nov. 6, as Republicans and Democrats fight for control of the House and possibly the Senate. Trump is agitating for more money for his long-promised border wall with Mexico. So far, he has been frustrated by limited success on that front.
“We need the wall. We’re going to have it all. And again, that wall has started. We got $1.6 billion. We come up again (in) September,” Trump said in a campaign-style event in Michigan last month. “If we don’t get border security, we’ll have no choice. We’ll close down the country because we need border security.”
a fight between trump and the republicans on the eve of the midterms is good news for us.
We have great allies
Chelsea Clinton: Trump 'degrades what it means to be an American'
The Trump administration is laden with "cruelty and incompetence and corruption," and President Trump's actions degrade America, Chelsea Clinton said in an interview with a British media outlet.
CNN host Brian Stelter: Trump is a 'well-documented' liar
President Trump is the leader of the United States. He is also a liar. This has been well-documented. Lying was a big part of his business strategy ... Now, as commander in chief, he misleads the public constantly": @brianstelter discusses the media calling a lie a lie
have you all noticed the media being more honest about trump’s dishonestly lately? this is a welcome change.
Why New Jersey is leading the resistance to Trump’s offshore drilling plan
Across the Atlantic Coast strip, mayors in nearly every city teamed with council members, conservationists, business leaders and residents to craft resolutions that denounced the proposal to widen federal offshore leasing to 90 percent of the outer continental shelf, an effort that began just days after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced the plan in January.
They helped put New Jersey at the forefront of resistance to Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda, crafting obstacles to the five-year lease proposal that at least one other state copied and another is considering.
Last month, New Jersey became the first Atlantic state to adopt a legal barrier to offshore drilling. Lawmakers passed a bill, signed by Gov. Phil Murphy (D), that prohibits oil exploration in state waters, which extend three miles from shore.
Court: Gov’t violated privacy law for defrauded students
A federal court has ruled that the Education Department violated privacy laws with regard to students defrauded by the Corinthian for-profit college chain.
In a break with Obama administration policy, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced in December that some students cheated by the now-defunct schools would only get a part of their federal student loan forgiven. In order to determine how much to forgive, the agency analyzes average earnings of graduates from similar programs.
But a California district court ruled late Friday that the department’s use of Social Security Administration data in order to calculate loan forgiveness violates the Privacy Act. The court ordered that the Education Department stop the practice and stop debt collection from these students.
Before I go, please remember: NOVEMBER NOVEMBER NOVEMBER!!! We are not guaranteed a blue wave, but we can have one if we work hard. It is within our grasp. What are YOU going to do to save our democracy?
Do these things! Or at least some!
Donate to ActBlue
Donate to Swing Left
Send postcards to voters in other districts
Sign up to go door to door in your district
Sign up to drive people to the polls
Find your local Democratic Party and volunteer!
Also, if you have 5 minutes, call your reps to push them to protect the midterms from Russian intervention.
Eyes on the prize, everyone. Eyes on the prize.
When you are feeling exhausted with the calls you have to make to your reps, and the postcards you have to send, and the stress of every tweet he sends, and the frustration of every fox news episode supporting him, watch this video and remember what real struggle is.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
People were beaten on the streets in their fight for justice and equality. They were strong enough to keep going. Honor their memories and do what you can for our country right now.
We can’t let hatred win. We have made so much progress and we, you and I, can keep our country from sliding back. We can do this ❤️ ✊ ❤️.
We owe it to all those brave men and women who fought, bled, and died for a more equal America. This struggle, this “resistance” is the least we can do in their memories.
Eyes on the prize.
so proud, grateful, and humbled to be in this with all of you ❤️ ✊ ❤️