Open Thread for Thursday, November 10 , 2016
While DD recharges his batteries, we will have special guest threadmeisters filling in for a few days. And, since today is my turn, I will open and close this thread with the two songs that came to mind on the morning after the election. Stephen Sondheim’s “Another National Anthem” is from his brilliant show “Assassins”. This song, which presages the show’s inevitable climax, takes place when the misfits, who are either assassins or would-be assassins, rise up to banish the sunny optimism of the Balladeer, played by Neil Patrick Harris, from the stage. It would be the other national anthem if Trump supporters were capable of singing Sondheim:
And off we go. It turns out that the Clinton team was not as confident as they seemed to be throughout the campaign. From this superb Politico piece:
Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem—addressing anger about a rigged economy and government—and that Clinton already never authentically could. Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.
So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted to live in. It wasn’t enough.
Using Trump as a foil and a focus, she hit on a voice and an argument for why she should actually be president that perhaps only she could have, and that she’d struggled for so long to find on her own. That wasn’t enough, either.
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another candidate. She couldn’t escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
This article fills in a lot of detail on the campaign and is worthy of your time.
Is Trump set to deep-six Paris climate deal? And can he? The Hill explores that question here:
Given the U.S. position as the world’s number two polluter, American commitment to the Paris deal is key to its success. Any opposition from Trump to the plan will raise questions about its viability going forward.
Already, international negotiators and American environmentalists are saying they will fight to save the deal regardless of Trump.
“What we know is that it will be extraordinarily difficult for Trump to remove the U.S. from the Paris agreement,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club.
“His position is already causing international blowback abroad, and in very pointed ways, that are in some respects unprecedented. If Trump does try to undermine climate action, he will run headlong into an organized mass of people who will fight him in the courts, in the states, in the Congress, in the marketplace and in the streets.”
Big Tuesday Wins for Marijuana Legalization.
California, Massachusetts and Nevada legalized marijuana on Tuesday in what advocates said was a reflection of the country’s changing attitude toward the drug.
Leading up to the election, recreational marijuana use was legal in four states: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, along with Washington, D.C.
With the addition of California, Massachusetts and Nevada, the percentage of Americans living in states where marijuana use is legal for adults rose above 20 percent, from 5 percent.
The California measure, which passed with 56 percent approval, allows people over 21 to possess limited amounts of marijuana for personal use and also permits the personal cultivation of up to six plants in private residences, provided they are shielded from public view.
California projects to net about $1 billion annually due to the passage of this initiative. Somewhere, John Carney is yawning. Not having the ‘vision thing’ means never having to envision anything.
NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported Wednesday that the NFL Players Association is actively studying the use of medical marijuana as opposed to opioids as a pain management issue and is in the process of putting together a committee to study it.
This should be enough to start the daily conversation.
I wish I could conclude with a song brimming with optimism for the future. But this song, and not for the first time, sums up my mood about what just happened:
It’s worth pointing out that Podesta’s emails did not get “hacked.” There was no team of elite hackers using high-powered computer code to secretly burrow into Podesta’s gmail account. Instead, Podesta fell for a simple spearphishing ruse. With his own hands he clicked on a link in an email purporting to be from Google, which took him to a faked Google website, where he dutifully entered his username and password. Podesta is a bigger goat than is understood, and part of the silver lining is that this gullible man will not be Chief of Staff.
This is why DD is so much better at this than me. He would not have missed Michael Moore’s must-read To-Do List:
https://www.good.is/articles/moore-five-point-plan
Which is now TWO must-read To-Do Lists:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-post-election-to-do-list-day-2-trump_us_5824b9e4e4b02a0512936c89
My to-do list includes driving up to Philadelphia for the anti-Trump rally at 4:30 at City Hall. My Maoist friend tells me it’s an approved (meaning police-patrolled) rally, which she thinks makes it illegitimate (“the creative spontaneous initiative of the masses is strangled in its crib”), but I’m gonna check it out.
If Ed Rendell’s there, throw a snowball at him.
It’s not a Democratic event.
Nor should it be.
There’s more than a little truth in this statement:
“The Democrats’ central strategy for appealing to blue-collar voters in the 21st century has been for Bruce Springsteen to play a concert in Cleveland or Philly a few days before Election Day and pray to God that working-class people fall in line with their Boss at the polls. But if this election proved anything, it’s that celebrity firepower doesn’t mean squat (unless your last name’s Trump, apparently). Springsteen’s written a lot of impeccable songs about American elbow grease over the years, but he’s a rich guy now—and a bandanna slung around his neck isn’t going to trick even the most naive people into thinking otherwise.”
That excerpt is from this article in No Depression that posits that maybe D’s would do better to listen to JD Vance and Texas troubadour James McMurtry. I agree:
http://nodepression.com/article/james-mcmurtry-jd-vance-coping-trump
Yeah, that makes sense. White people weren’t tricked by rich Bruce Springsteen – they couldn’t relate to him, so they voted for Trump instead.
Here’s a possible reason!
But maybe it was Springsteen. 😉
There will be Congressional retirements, so Democrats better get their shit together for special elections.
And NeverTrump senators don’t seem to have much of a future… is it too much to hope for one or two or them to switch parties a la Jim Jeffords in 2001?
The overreach begins immediately. Paul Ryan pushes his plan to privatize Medicare:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/paul-ryan-says-medicare-privatization-is-on.html
OK, I’m not getting this. The Russians have admitted contact with the Trump campaign. Trump still has not released his tax returns so we don’t even know if they have any business interests they can hold over him.
Where is the call for congressional investigation of this? I don’t care what party he’s in, since when don’t Republicans care about national security? Wake up!