#but it was hard to be like 'yes george w bush is the worst president ever' at that point

[shitty-check-please-aus]

ughhh I checked out an audiobook for a book that I already read 

[back-and-totheleft]

On a warm day in October, Oliver Stone leads a visitor into the sun room of his house in Brentwood, where he has been re-reading the daily journals he kept during the production of “JFK,” his kaleidoscopic drama about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Thirty years after its release in December of 1991, “JFK’s” influence can still be detected, on everything from Washington policy to Hollywood world-building. For baby boomers, it was a film that tapped into still-raw generational loss. For Gen-Xers, it defined all they knew about Kennedy and his death. Its form pushed visual language to visceral new extremes. Its content helped introduce a new generation to America’s long conspiratorial tradition. “JFK” is still with us, in style and substance.

Stone, 75, is recalling his preparations for the first day of filming on April 15, 1991. Peering avuncularly through a pair of reading glasses, he scans pages covered with looping blue scrawls.

“The Iraq War is coming into being, which is a big thing for me, because [‘JFK’ is] about war, and the preparation for war,” notes Stone, a Vietnam veteran. “It was unbelievable to see that happening in my lifetime again — to get geared up to send 500,000 men to Saudi Arabia. It was like doing the same thing we did in Vietnam, so foolishly.”

He flips through another few pages.

“And my 16-year-old dog was dying, too,” he says with a sigh. [...]

People who judge “JFK” for its accuracy — even for its fairness — are not wrong. But they too often ignore the vacuum that created it in the first place: the covert actions and cover-ups that have done far more to sow public mistrust than Hollywood. What’s more, they overlook what might be the most enduring value of Stone’s film. “JFK” is less about John F. Kennedy in 1963 or Jim Garrison in 1969 than Oliver Stone in 1991: a man whose primal wound — being lied to about why he went to war — had never healed, a man whose prodigious gifts as a storyteller naturally fused with the unresolved loss and deep-seated doubts of his contemporaries, a man whose dog just died. By the time Costner’s Garrison delivers his summation in “JFK,” he barely refers to Shaw or Kennedy: He is making a plea on behalf of a generation that had never gotten accountability after the official lies and betrayals that had conditioned most of their lives.

On a crammed shelf in Stone’s second-floor office, not far from where three Oscars share space with the Whole Earth Catalog, sit books about Costa-Gavras, whose taut 1969 political thriller “Z” was an inspiration for “JFK,” and Frank Capra, traces of whose “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” can be heard in Costner’s final speech. “Costa-Gavras meets Frank Capra” might be the best way to describe a director as fluent with polemic as he is with throat-catching emotion. “Yes, you know what side I’m on,” Stone says of his characterizations. “I didn’t say it was an impartial documentary, did I?”

To spend time with Oliver Stone is to enter a different kind of looking glass, where a man often caricatured as a wild-eyed provocateur is thoughtful, easygoing and generous even at his most contrarian; where he’ll go hammer and tongs about Clay Shaw’s role in the CIA or the Kennedys’ relationship with Dulles (“You’re hard core,” he says, shaking his head, after a spirited back-and-forth about the single-bullet theory), and then invite a journalist to peruse his “JFK” archive while he goes upstairs to work. He is not a Trump fan and considers George W. Bush “the worst president we’ve ever had.” He rejects present-day conspiracies like QAnon, but he thinks the Jan. 6 insurrection has been overblown. For the record, Stone has been quadruple-vaxxed against covid-19: “Two Sputniks and two Pfizers,” he says proudly.

Stone’s last narrative feature was 2016’s “Snowden”; since 2001 he’s been making documentaries, including admiring portraits of Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin. He is currently at work on a film in favor of nuclear energy. Nonfiction, he says, is “more alluring to me as a way to tell the truth, without … having to go through all the BS of disguising.”

Still, he accepts that “JFK” will remain his undisputed masterwork. When asked about the film’s legacy, Stone demurs. “I think it’s one of a kind,” he says simply, adding that it marked a crucial turning point in his career.

“No longer was I judged as a filmmaker,” he says, admitting that his journey through the vagaries of public opinion left him feeling defensive and hurt.

“A lot of filmmakers would say, ‘It’s just a movie.’ It never felt like that to me. A filmmaker should take responsibility for his movie, whether it’s fiction or fact.”

As for the “conspiracy theorist” label he has carried since making “JFK,” he is both philosophical and unapologetic. “I have really not gone in that direction,” he says, before adding: “Conspiracies have happened. Anybody who reads history knows that. But we act so innocent in America, like ‘Who, us?’ ” Stone laughs ruefully. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

-Ann Hornaday, "‘JFK’ at 30: Oliver Stone and the lasting impact of America’s most dangerous movie," The Washington Post, Dec 22 2021 [x]

[qqueenofhades]

Okay, y'all. Time to do this one more time. Let the fact that there are so many of these posts right now reinforce the point. Many of you already know this, and I see and love you, but for anyone still ~undecided about their choice, should they be an American citizen of voting age on November 3, 2020:

Time to not be. It was time a long, long while ago, but I am going to have to say it again.

Primary season is over. The endless fine-tooth combing of candidates' policies and positions is over. We are all deeply well aware that the candidates on the Democratic ticket, being human beings and establishment politicians, are flawed. "BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS POSITION FROM 19/ 20-WHENEVER AS JUSTIFICATION FOR WHY IT'S TERRIBLE TO VOTE FOR -- "

No. Stop. Just stop. Stop threatening to hold the rest of us hostage, in the middle of a pandemic, the Great Depression, and racial inequality and protests on a scale not seen from the 1960s, because you did not get Barbie Dream Candidate. That is the behavior of terrorists and toddlers. If your supposedly enlightened morally pure ideology does not involve any action to mitigate the harm that is directly in front of you, it isn't worth a shit as an ideology actually devoted to helping people. If your approach to politics is to shout about how Pure your ideas are on twitter and tear down anyone working within a system of flawed choices to do the good that they can: you're not helping, and frankly, your constant threats to withhold your suffrage as a punishment to us aren't convincing the rest of us that we really need to listen to you or that you have anyone's best interests at heart. The Online Left TM is as much a vacuous, self-reinforcing noise chamber as the Online Right TM, and can sometimes tend to be even more dangerous.

I was saying this in 2016. A lot of us were saying this in 2016. I am just about to turn 32 years old and have been voting in federal elections for almost 15 years. For what it's worth.

This is not an ordinary election. This is not a contest between two flawed candidates who respect the system and want to work to enact their policies in the ordinary way. One is a flawed 90s era Democrat who nonetheless has already been pushed CONSIDERABLY left in his policies and platforms since the end of the primaries (and his existing platform would already make him the most left president elected, even more than Obama). The other is a fascist dictator who has openly spoken about refusing to accept the election results, his desire to abolish term limits and serve for life, and complete the pillaging of any remaining fragile American public funds for him and his cult of cronies. He does not respect the system. He does not want to do anything for anyone that is not himself. 160,000 and counting needless deaths of American citizens have already happened. Will keep happening.

This is the last time Trump has to face voters. This is the last chance the country has to repudiate his entire poisonous ideology and its marching Nazi minions. IF he steps aside, which is already far from guaranteed, he can ride off into the sunset as a vindicated two term president and probably be rehabilitated like George W. Bush was within a few years of leaving office. American political memory is very short. It will happen. Again, if he even leaves.

RBG is 87 and has cancer again. She will NOT survive another four years. Stephen Breyer is 81. Their seats could both come up in the next four years. The Supreme Court could be a right wing rubber stamp for whatever time we all have left before climate change and coronavirus kill us all.

"But if people just thought for themselves and did their homework and didn't vote the party line like sheep, we could support a third party/write in -- " Stop. Just stop. Attend a ninth grade civics class and learn about how politics work in America. Yes, the two-party system sucks. Yes, the Electoral College is a hot steaming pile of absolute bullshit. Magical unicorn fairy dust fantasies WILL NOT change that.

Do not vote for Kanye (who has pretty much openly admitted he is trying to play spoiler to Biden on behalf of his buddy Trump). Do not vote for godforsaken fucking Gary Johnson or Jill Stein who appear on ballots just to give sanctimonious leftists the illusion of virtue-signaling. If you want any chance of fixing the mess that 2020 has left America and the world in, you need to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The end.

Biden is a flawed old man who was our last choice, sure. He is also a distinguished public servant who has already been in the White House for eight years under Obama and thus we KNOW what to expect. He is an empathetic man who connects with people's personal tragedy and picked as his running mate a younger Black/biracial woman who directly confronted and called him out on past behavior. While the pundit class was simpering and whining about how it was Disrespectful and how could he consider her, Biden did so, and that speaks well to me of the fact that he is willing to learn, to take criticism, and not just accept it from a former Black female rival, but make her his second in command and the potential first female president of the United States.

Can you EVER picture Trump doing that? Not in eight thousand million years.

As for Kamala, we are all aware of her previous checkered history as a prosecutor (and even then, she did plenty of good things as well!). Since joining the Senate, however, she has consistently become one of its most progressive members. She is the co-sponsor of an economic aid package designed to give every American $2,000/month, backdated to March (the start of the coronavirus pandemic) and continuing at least a few months after its end. A Biden-Harris White House could make that happen. Especially if they are put into office with a Democratic House and Senate (for the love of God, Kentucky, kill Mitch McConnell with fire). That is just one example.

Harris's nomination is obviously historic. And Biden didn't choose another Biden (or another Tim Kaine, the blandest white man imaginable). He chose another Obama: a younger rising star of an immigrant background, a person of color, a former lawyer and someone who represents the diversity of the country that the white supremacists and the Cheeto in Chief have tried to paint as its worst and most degenerate evil.

A vote for Biden and Harris means getting rid not just of Trump, but Mike Pence, Vladimir Putin, Jared Kushner, Betsy Devos, the Trump crony destroying the Postal Service, the rampant coronavirus misinformation and bullshit, the destruction of Social Security and Medicare, the spread of Nazi propaganda from the President's twitter account, the likely two Supreme Court picks that would be as bad as Brett Kavanaugh or worse... on and on. Biden and Harris would be elected by progressive voters and thus answerable to them in 2022 midterms and 2024 general. They can both be, and already have been, pushed further left. They are reasonable and competent adults who have demonstrated experience and compassion. I KNOW about their flaws and past actions I don't agree with. But I'm frankly done with any more counterproductive straw man bitching about This One Bad Thing They Did and how it makes it a terribad awful choice to vote for them. Open your eyes. Look at the alternative. LOOK AT WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED AND THE FACT THAT THIS IS NOT EVEN AS BAD AS IT COULD STILL GET.

Check your registration or register at vote.gov.

DO NOT LOOK AT POLLS AND DECIDE "EH BIDEN IS CLEARLY GOING TO WIN, I DON'T NEED TO VOTE." THAT IS HOW WE LOST LAST TIME.

Unseating incumbents is HARD. It is even harder when the other side has openly laid out their plan to cheat in great detail, and there is nothing really stopping them from doing it. The only thing, in fact, is massive, unfalsifiable results on an undeniable scale.

So:

Vote.

Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Thanks a lot.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

2022 midterms and 2024 general

2022 is an important year because the House of Representatives is reapportioning itself; following the 2020 census, the states have been tasked with redrawing district maps to “reflect” the new population.  Partisan gerrymandering has been a problem for decades, but it has become a thoroughly entrenched problem following the 2019 Supreme Court decision that gerrymandering is outside the scope of federal courts; the 5-4 conservative majority decided that they can not and will not rule on the matter again, leaving it up to Congress and the states to figure it out.  Congress can’t get anything done, so a gerrymandering ban is all but impossible, meaning the states have total control over their new maps.  A majority of the states are controlled by Republicans, despite representing less than half the country; there are more smaller states than bigger states, so even though more people live in urban areas, the rural areas get the majority voice in the redistricting process.

This means that 2022 is going to be probably the worst gerrymandered year in American history; given that the Supreme Court has since changed to a 6-3 conservative majority, I don’t see them overturning their previous decision any time soon, meaning Republicans have an inordinate advantage going forward.

Let’s look at the 20th century as a guide to see if we can make any predictions.

1902: Republican Teddy Roosevelt is president, and the Republicans control both the House and Senate.  Following the election, they maintain control.

1912: Republican William Howard Taft is president, Republicans control the Senate, Democrats control the House.  At this time, both parties had liberal and conservative wings, and the Republicans were having a civil war between the liberal Roosevelt faction and the conservative Taft faction.  Roosevelt ran against his own party’s incumbent as a Progressive, a third party spoiler, giving the White House to the Democrats for the first time since the 1880s (and to a southerner for the first time since the Civil War).  Democrats kept the House and took back the White House and Senate, giving Woodrow Wilson the trifecta.

1922: Republican Warren G. Harding is president, Republicans control both the House and Senate.  This year is special because it is the first time in American history that the House was unable to reapportion itself after a census; there was a major battle across the country between rural and urban state legislatures, so Congress eventually passed a law in 1929 to set the number of House seats permanently at 435, the level it had reached by that time.  Before this, the House grew ever ten years, inflating with population; it has been stagnant ever since, making each Congress less representative than the one before it.  Republicans maintained control of the House and Senate.

1932: Republican Herbert Hoover is president, Republicans control the Senate, Democrats control the House.  Hoover was more or less single-handedly responsible for the Great Depression, refusing to give aid to the people, forever ranking him as one of the worst presidents in American history; he was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt who dragged us out of the depression and jump started the economy during World War II, becoming one of the greatest presidents in American history.  Democrats won super-majorities in both the House and Senate, giving Roosevelt all but unlimited power (the only thing keeping him from literally becoming a king was that Democrats were still split between the more liberal north and the conservative south).

1942: Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt is still president, on his third term, and Democrats still control the House and Senate.  They maintain control after the election.

1952: Democrat Harry S. Truman is president, but the recently passed 22nd Amendment forbid him from running for a third term.  This is the first reapportionment year of the century without an incumbent president running for re-election; Democrats still control the House and Senate.  After 20 years of Democratic rule, the country elects Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower a war hero and basically America Incarnate. He was everything they wanted in a president; he was manly, intelligent, anti-communist, super Christian, and racially tolerant.  Republicans took back the White House, the House and Senate, giving Eisenhower the trifecta.

1962: Democrat John F. Kennedy is president, and Democrats control both the House and Senate.  They maintain control after the election.

1972: Republican Richard Nixon is president, but Democrats maintain control of both the House and Senate.  Nixon stole this election by hiring goons to break into the Democratic headquarters and steal dirt on his political opponent (Watergate Scandal).  His campaign forged a letter from his strongest rival Edmund Muskie of Maine, in which they made it look like he was insulting the French-Canadian population, which would be like someone from Florida insulting Cubans, or someone from California insulting Mexicans.  Muskie cried giving a speech denouncing the letter, imploding his campaign.  The Democrats instead went with the unpopular George McGovern of South Dakota, a political nobody; Nixon hurt HIS campaign by revealing that his running mate Thomas Eagleton had depression and previously underwent electro-shock therapy, runing his career and forcing McGovern to replace him at the last minute with Sargent Shriver, whose main claim to fame was being married to John F. Kennedy’s sister.  Nixon won in a landslide, winning 49 states including South Dakota.  Nixon failed to cover up his crimes and resigned in 1974 before he could be impeached.  Democrats kept both the House and Senate.

1982: Republican Ronald Reagan is president.  Republicans control the Senate, but Democrats control the House.  Both parties keep their respective chambers following the election.

1992: Republican George H.W. Bush is president, and Democrats control both the House and Senate.  Bush is nowhere near as popular as Reagan was, riding his coattails into office and then stumbling through his first term.  During his campaign he said “read my lips: no new taxes.”  During his term he created new taxes.  Whoops.  He cared more about foreign policy than domestic, but still fumbled the Gulf War; we pushed Saddam out of Kuwait (yay), but then overthrew the Kuwaiti government (boo).  The war had so much buildup; it was the only thing reported on TV for weeks and months, and it was over in days, so everyone was like “what was the point?”  He may still have won re-election were it not for Ross Perot; a businessman from Bush’s own Texas, he ran the most successful third party campaign in modern history.  He didn’t win any states, but he had national appeal where former third-partiers only had regional appeal; he split the ticket in all 50 states, meaning that Bush and Democratic rival Bill Clinton won multiple states with less than 50% of the vote.  Clinton was a charismatic young southern Democrat in direct opposition to old pretender Bush (he was a new Englander pretending to be a Texan).  Democrats won the White House, and kept both chambers of Congress, giving Clinton the trifecta.

2002: Republican George W. Bush is president (the H.W.’s son), and while the Republicans control the House, the Senate is split 50-50 for the first time in history.  This should mean that Republican control the Senate because Dick Cheney was VP, but midway through 2001, Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords left the party to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, giving them an effective 51-49 majority (fun fact: Jeffords was eventually succeeded by none other than Bernie Sanders).  Bush Jr. was a warmonger who wanted to “redeem” the Bush family legacy by finishing what his daddy started; he used the tragedy of 9/11 as a pretense to go to war with Iraq so he could topple Saddam, even though Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, had no ties to al-Qaeda, and possessed no WMDs.  Republicans kept the House and narrowly won back the Senate after the election.

2012: Democrat Barack Obama is president.  Democrats control the Senate, but Republicans control the House.  Both parties keep their respective chambers, but Democrats win a handful of new House seats despite the re-districting.

2022: Democrat Joe Biden is president (in the event of an unforeseen tragedy, it might be Kamala Harris).  Democrats control the House and Senate by razor-thin margins, meaning single-digit rebels could deadlock Congress entirely.  It is very likely the Republicans will take back the House, and I give both parties a dead even chance of winning the Senate.  Democrats are certainly going to lose Georgia and possibly Arizona, but could pick up Pennsylvania and maybe even Wisconsin; Pennsylvania is open because the Republican incumbent is retiring, but the Wisconsin incumbent is running for re-election, so that one will be an uphill battle.  Those two are their best shots; maybe North Carolina (no incumbent), maybe Florida (yes incumbent), but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  There’s a non-zero percent chance Congress could remain deadlocked 50-50.  It depends on if Biden/Harris get anything substantive done this year.

It appears that the majority party in the House has the advantage going into the next re-districting cycle, but it has never been this close before and it fails to account for the Republican Revolution in the 80s and 90s.  The Democrats maintained control of the House for 60 years, then Bill Clinton took office and the Republicans reorganized themselves in opposition to everything he stood for (even in the areas where he stood with them).  Newt Gingrich took the Republican party from defense to offense, changing the playbook so they cared less about policy and more about culture; since then, instead of running for stuff, Republicans run against stuff.  Their entire platform became “oppose Democrats,” with no real plan besides doing the opposite of what the other party wants to do; remind you, in 2016 Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court because he was a politically neutral choice who Republicans had no qualms against, they just refused to seat him because they hated Obama.  Trump was a symptom of this backpedaling, he helped narrow the Republican platform even more, to the point that they didn’t change a thing between 2016 and 2020.  That’s unheard of; a lot changed between then and now, and they didn’t feel the need to update ANYTHING, no new ideas, no new promises, just more of the same.  It worked in 2016, and they thought it would work again in 2020, but then the pandemic hit and unemployment spiked to Great Depression levels and we entered a recession, turning Trump from Ronald Reagan to Herbert Hoover.  It is historically difficult to defeat incumbent presidents, Trump was just a wildly unpopular idiot, and Biden was inoffensive and pretty close to politically neutral (he’s a moderate Democrat who is convinced he can work with Republicans even though their MO is still to oppose him on principle; they will NEVER work with him).

2024 seems so far away, but we’re already getting a taste at what it may look like.  If Trump decides to run again, he will absolutely win the Republican nomination; if he runs again, no other candidate will even try to throw their hat in the ring, they worship at his feet, they’d never dare oppose him.  In that case, it will be a rematch between Biden and Trump, which hasn’t gone to the challenger since Grover Cleveland won a nonconsecutive second term in 1892.  Trump will lose the popular vote for the third time, but could eke by with a slim Electoral College victory if Republicans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia implement their anti-voting laws.  If Biden doesn’t run for a second term, the Democratic nomination will absolutely go to Kamala Harris, meaning it’ll be Harris v Trump, a repeat of Clinton v Trump in 2016.  A competent but politically moderate woman pretending to be a left-wing progressive will be torn apart by the media, third party candidates will be treated like real challengers, and the republicans will take the White House with a minority vote for the third time in a row (the last time a Republican won the presidency with a majority vote was George H.W. Bush in 1988.  Bush Jr was re-elected with a majority vote in 2004, but he lost his initial race in 2000 and was given the victory by the Supreme Court.  Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 elections, but have only seated 3 presidents).

Biden v Trump is up in the air

Harris v Trump will probably go to Trump

If Trump doesn’t run, then the Republican race may be as crowded as it was in 2016, only this time the dozen or so candidates will be vying for an endorsement from Trump.  Whoever he picks will become the nominee, so over the next year or two we can expect a ton of right-wing nutjobs to try and position themselves as his heir apparent.  Some people think it will be one of his adult children, Don Jr or Eric or maybe Ivanka, but they’re not quite as popular as their dear old dad, and he hates them anyway (he hates Don Jr because he has the same name as him, he hates Eric because he’s a bigger idiot than he is, and he wants to fuck Ivanka’s brains out).  More likely, the nomination will go to a far-right sycophant like Ted Cruz who came in second behind Trump in 2016, or Ron DeSantis who is positioning himself as Trump’s #2 guy in Florida.  Rick Scott is also vying for that position, so he could give DeSantis a run for his money, and senators generally perform better than governors, so I’d watch them closely.  It won’t be a moderate Republican; that will never happen again.  They ran moderates in 2008 and 2012 and they got their asses handed to them by Obama, their wing of the party has all but evaporated, there are no viable moderate Republicans anymore, so blue-state Republican governors like Hogan (MD), Scott (VT, no relation), and Baker (MA) don’t stand a chance.  Trump IS the Republican party, so what he says goes.  It’ll be a competition to see who can suck up to him the hardest and win over his base, but it’s not a race Trump will leave quietly.  He could be a kingmaker, but that would mean giving up his spot as leader of the party, something he doesn’t want to do.  If he doesn’t run, he’ll still basically be running vicariously through whichever candidate gets the nomination; it’ll be a Trump puppet, Diet Trump, store brand Trump “sorry we’re out of Coke, is Pepsi okay?”  They’ll never be as popular as the real thing, and Biden will have the incumbency advantage after rescuing the country from the pandemic and the recession, so 2024 is the Democrats’ to lose.

I predict that Biden will be re-elected in 2024, but Republicans will take back both chambers of Congress.  He will resign halfway through his second term due to declining health, making Harris the first female president, who will then lose handily in 2028 against a Republican woman (both will face misogyny, but the Republican will be white, so she’ll have it easier).  Biden and Harris will seat no Supreme Court justices after 2022, so Breyer needs to retire RIGHT THE FUCK NOW or else he’ll become the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  When the Republicans take back the White House, Clarence Thomas will probably retire and be replaced by a young black woman who is even more conservative than he is, just to stick it to the Democrats.  Roberts and Alito (conservative), and Kagan and Sotomayor (liberal) are relatively young, so they won’t be leaving anytime soon, and Trump’s 3 appointees are stuck for decades, so Breyer will be the only liberal vacancy in the foreseeable future; if Democrats replace him, the court remains 6-3 conservative, but it will put them in a better position going forward.  If Republicans replace him, they’ll get 7-2 conservative, which would be bad for women (especially trans women), the rest of the LGBT community, black people, immigrants, poor people, and everyone else who isn’t explicitly a Republican demographic.

If Democrats want to swing the country away from fascism, they need to act decisively and soon!  Nuke the filibuster, pus through electoral reform, expand the Supreme Court, get rid of the Electoral College, ensure that no party can rule without majority support ever again.  This would almost certainly lead to a civil war as conservative shit their pants with fear over having to campaign on popular ideas for once; the states would push back hard, the courts would push back hard (McConnell and the Republicans packed the courts by refusing to let Obama seat anyone after 2015, accruing hundreds of vacancies for Trump to fill), and Trump’s base would fight back hardest of all.  They would make January 6th look like child’s play, it would be a total bloodbath, all out revolution!  We need a constitutional convention to overhaul the system, but that would create more questions than answers, and the conservative minority would still weasel their way into power through compromises just as they’ve always done.  The senate is disproportional to appease conservatives, black people counted as 3/5 of a person to appease conservatives, free and slave states were admitted in equal number to appease conservatives, reconstruction was ended to appease conservatives, appeasement is the only way conservatives prosper!

[msclaritea]

There is only one good thing that can come from the power-mad Republican rush to jam Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court before Election Day: Of a sudden, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, Americans in the tens of millions now know that our country faces a crisis of democracy triggered by the right wing’s quest for unchecked judicial dominance.

Barrett’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and President Trump’s comments before nominating her, brought home just how dangerously disrespectful of democratic norms the enlarged conservative majority on the court threatens to be.

Her silence on the most basic issues of republican self-rule tells us to be ready for the worst. She wouldn’t say if voter intimidation is illegal, even though it plainly is. She wouldn’t say if a president has the power to postpone an election, even though he doesn’t.

She wouldn’t even say that a president should commit himself to a peaceful transfer of power, telling Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) that “to the extent that this is a political controversy right now, as a judge I want to stay out of it.”

What, pray, is controversial in a democratic republic about the peaceful transfer of power? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that she was nodding to the president who nominated her. He said he wanted a friendly judge on the court to deal with electoral matters, and he continues to signal that one of the most hallowed concepts of a free republic is inoperative when it comes to himself.

Rushing to confirm such a nominee just in time to rule on any election controversies (from which she refused to commit to recusing herself) would be troubling enough. But it is all the worse for being part of a tangle of excesses by the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

The truly scandalous lack of institutional patriotism on the right has finally led many of the most sober liberals and moderates to ponder what they opposed even a month ago: The only genuinely practical and proper remedy to conservative court-packing is to undo its impact by enlarging the court.

Note the language I just used. Court-packing is now a fact. It was carried out by a Republican Senate that was cynically inconsistent when it came to the question of filling a court seat during an election year. A Democratic president could not get a hearing on Judge Merrick Garland. A Republican president got express delivery on Judge Barrett.

That’s two seats flipped. Then consider the lawless 5-to-4 Bush v. Gore ruling by conservative justices in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and let George W. Bush become president. (Oh, yes, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Barrett were all Bush lawyers in that fight. All in the family.) After winning reelection the normal way, Bush appointed Roberts and then Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the high court in 2005.

That’s four seats out of nine.

It’s not court enlargement that’s radical. Balancing a stacked court is a necessary response to the right’s radicalism and (apologies, Thomas Jefferson) to its long train of abuses. And conservatives are as hypocritical about court enlargement as they are about Garland and Barrett: In 2016, Republicans expanded the state supreme courts of Georgia and Arizona to enhance their party’s philosophical sway.

Democracy itself is at stake here. If the oligarchy-enhancing Citizens United decision and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County ruling don’t convince you of this, reflect on a study by the pro-enlargement group Take Back the Court. In 175 election-related cases this year, it found that Republican appointees interpreted the law in ways that impeded access to the ballot 80 percent of the time, compared with 37 percent for Democratic appointees. (The group pegged the “anti-democracy” score of Trump appointees at 86 percent.)

Court enlargement will be a long battle, but those of us who support it should be encouraged, not discouraged, by Joe Biden’s call for a bipartisan commission to study a court system that is, as Biden put it, “getting out of whack.”

Biden is a long-standing opponent of enlargement, so his statement is an acknowledgment that this crisis can’t be avoided. His commission would help the public, which usually doesn’t want to worry about judges, understand the danger of a judiciary dominated by reactionaries.

Sadly, the best case for enlargement is likely to be made by the court’s conservative judicial activists themselves. It would be good for democracy if they showed some restraint. But everything about this struggle so far tells us that restraint is no longer a word in their vocabulary, and that prudence is not a virtue they honor anymore.

[firstruleofmethclub]

Yes Eggboy is of course a national treasure, but if you’ve only seen the ~5sec version of the video that just shows the event itself (the most widely distributed version of it) you won’t have seen the horrific things Fraser Anning was saying immediately leading up to this, and more importantly, you won’t have seen the fact that this man in his 60s, a representative of the Australian Government, responded to the egging (an embarassing and annoying, but also completely harmless act) by repeatedly punching the person responsible, a literal teenager. He went absolutely fuckin’ ham, and only stopped hitting him because there was people between him and the kid. To that point though, the vast majority of those people were restraining the kid, which sounds fine on paper, but if you actually watch the footage, you will see that while he is restrained prone, multiple people are (or at least are attempting to) strike him, and one has him held by the throat so tightly he cannot speak and is turning purple. These were not Anning’s security, these were his psychopathic fans, that had come to hear his hate speech. These were people who had been given the okay by Neil Erikson, (who has previously been hosted at other white power rallies, and held a mock execution in public to incite hatred against Muslims... You can Google him if you want, he’s famous for a lot stuff, only most of it racist, but all of it proving he is a garbage human being) so of course they were violent white supremecists with a hardon for the prospect of torturing children. The media were the only people trying to stop him from being chocked (not very hard, but still). Seriously, if William Connolly wasn’t white, there is a massive chance he’d be dead right now. Or even if he still was white, but the media had been there to film everything, he could very well be dead. 

For those who come to defend Anning by saying that “You can’t treat elected officials like that”, I’ll remind you that Fraser Anning was never elected, he scored a whopping nineteen first preference votes in his electorate. The fact that he is in Government at all is thanks to the exploit of like, three seperate technicalities, which he took advantage of to get in as a member of One Nation, then, on his very first day on the job (where he also gave his famous “Final Solution” speech), he quit One Nation and declared himself an Independant so that the seat couldn’t be given back to the One Nation party member he took it from. So not elected at all. Also, I would put genuine money on betting that about 99% of the right wing nutjobs that are “shocked and appaled” at what happened to Anning, thought it was fuckin’ hilarious when someone chucked a sandwhich at Julia Gillard (an incident which she laughed off instead of throwing hands at the kid responsible), and yes, even when a shoe was thrown at conservative US President George W. Bush (a much more hazardous projectile than an egg), I can guaran-fuckin’-tee you, they thought that shit was gold and they’ve shared about 47 memes about it over the years. You don’t think what happened was “inappropriate” at all - so stop wasting everyone’s time and just admit that you hate brown people, and love people that talk openly about how it’s okay to kill brown people. That’s all this is.

People who hold stations like politicians and cops should be held to a higher standard than everyone else, corruption and hatemongering and bigotry should be even less acceptable when it comes from these people than when it comes from anyone else, so why are theses the people who are constantly defended for it?

If you can ignore all of that, and truly think that an egging is as heinous a crime as there can be, and that Fraser Anning is a perfect Angel who has been victimised by this yolk-wielding teenage beast, then at the very least, think about the fact that this all happened in the first place, because Anning wanted a platform to talk about how in New Zealand, the worst massacre in the country’s history just took place, and he wants to tell you, that the 50 people who were senselessly murdered by a white man with a gun, has precisely zero to do with white men, murderers, or guns, and the blame exclusively lies at the feet of the Muslim immigrants in the country. After all, if they weren’t there, they couldn’t have been shot. And that is the genius fucking logic you are throwing your weight behind. Somebody commited violent acts against Muslims, and he thinks should prove to the world “the link between Muslims and violence”. By his own logic, if someone burnt Fraser Annings house down and chopped his arm off, all this would serve to do is “prove the connection between Fraser Anning and Arson/Mayhem”. Or in this particular example “The connection between Fraser Anning and juvenile pranks”.

[orbemnews]

Soaring Prices Herald Boom Time for Steel Makers For decades, the story of American steel had been one of job losses, mill closures and the bruising effects of foreign competition. But now, the industry is experiencing a comeback that few would have predicted even months ago. Steel prices are at record highs and demand is surging, as businesses step up production amid an easing of pandemic restrictions. Steel makers have consolidated in the past year, allowing them to exert more control over supply. Tariffs on foreign steel imposed by the Trump administration have kept cheaper imports out. And steel companies are hiring again. Evidence of the boom can even be found on Wall Street: Nucor, the country’s biggest steel producer, is this year’s top performing stock in the S&P 500, and shares of steel makers are generating some of the best returns in the index. “We are running 24/7 everywhere,” said Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, an Ohio-based steel producer that reported a significant surge in sales during its latest quarter. “Shifts that were not being used, we are using,” Mr. Goncalves said in an interview. “That’s why we’re hiring.” It’s not clear how long the boom will last. This week, the Biden administration began discussions with European Union trade officials about global steel markets. Some steel workers and executives believe that could lead to an eventual pullback of the Trump-era tariffs, which are widely credited for spurring the dramatic turnaround in the steel industry. However, any changes could be politically unpalatable given that the steel industry is concentrated in key electoral states. In early May, futures prices for 20-ton rolls of domestic steel — the benchmark for most steel prices nationwide — pushed above $1,600 per ton for the first time ever, and prices continue to hover there. Record prices for steel are not going to reverse decades of job losses. Since the early 1960s, employment in the steel industry has fallen more than 75 percent. More than 400,000 jobs disappeared as foreign competition grew and as the industry shifted toward production processes that required fewer workers. But the price surge is delivering some optimism to steel towns across the country, especially after job losses during the pandemic pushed American steel employment to the lowest level on record. “Last year we were laying off,” said Pete Trinidad, president of the United Steelworkers Local 6787 union, which represents roughly 3,300 workers at a Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill in Burns Harbor, Ind. “Everybody was offered jobs back. And we’re hiring now. So, yes, it’s a 180-degree turn.” Rising steel prices are partly a result of the nationwide scramble for commodities such as lumber, drywall and aluminum, as businesses ramping up operations grapple with scant inventories, empty supply chains and long waits for raw materials. But the price increases also reflect changes both in the steel industry, where bankruptcies and mergers have reorganized the country’s production base in recent years, and in Washington, where trade policies, most notably the tariffs imposed under President Donald J. Trump, have shifted the balance of power between buyers and sellers of American steel. Last year, Cleveland-Cliffs purchased a majority of the global steel giant ArcelorMittal’s American mills, after buying the struggling producer AK Steel, to create an integrated steel company that owns iron mines and blast furnaces. In December, U.S. Steel announced it would take full control of the Arkansas-based Big River Steel by purchasing the shares in the company that it did not already own. Goldman Sachs predicts that by 2023, roughly 80 percent of American steel production will be under the control of five companies, up from less than 50 percent in 2018. Consolidation gives companies in an industry greater ability to keep prices up by maintaining tight control over production. High steel prices also reflect efforts by the United States to cut down on steel imports in recent years, the latest in a long line of trade actions tied to steel. Today in Business Updated  May 20, 2021, 4:26 p.m. ET Steel, because of its historical concentration in key electoral states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, has long been a focus for politicians. Starting in the 1960s, as Europe and later Japan emerged from the postwar era as major steel producers, the industry pushed for — and regularly won — protection from imports under administrations of both political parties. More recently, cheap imports from China became the key target. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both imposed tariffs on Chinese-made steel. Mr. Trump said protecting steel was a cornerstone of his administration’s trade policies, and he imposed much broader tariffs on imported steel in 2018. Steel imports have collapsed by roughly a quarter, compared with 2017 levels, according to Goldman Sachs, opening up an opportunity for domestic producers, who are capturing prices as much as $600 per ton above those prevailing on the global markets. Those tariffs have been eased somewhat by one-off agreements with trade partners like Mexico and Canada, and by exemptions granted to companies. But the tariffs are in place and continue to be applied to imports from key competitors in the European Union and China. Until very recently, there were few developments on steel trade under the Biden administration. But on Monday, the United States and the European Union said they had started discussions to resolve a conflict over steel and aluminum imports that had played a major role in the Trump administration’s trade wars. It is unclear whether the talks will lead to any significant breakthroughs. They could, however, make for difficult politics for the White House. On Wednesday, a coalition of steel industry groups including steel manufacturing trade groups and the United Steelworkers union — whose leadership endorsed President Biden in the 2020 election — called on the Biden administration to ensure that tariffs remain in place. “Eliminating the steel tariffs now would undermine the viability of our industry,” they wrote in a letter addressed to the president. Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which announced the trade talks, said the discussions were focused on “effective solutions that address global steel and aluminum overcapacity by China and other countries while ensuring the long-term viability of our steel and aluminum industries.” Although producers are rejoicing, the price increases are painful for consumers of steel. At its Plymouth, Mich., plant, Clips & Clamps Industries employs roughly 50 workers who stamp and form steel into components for cars such as the metal props that are used to keep the hood open when checking the oil. “Last month, I can tell you, we lost money,” said Jeffrey Aznavorian, the manufacturer’s president. He attributed the loss, in part, to higher prices the company had to pay for steel. Mr. Aznavorian said he worried that his company would lose ground to foreign auto parts suppliers in Mexico and Canada who can buy cheaper steel and offer lower prices. And it does not look like things are going to get easier for steel buyers any time soon. Wall Street analysts recently lifted forecasts for U.S. steel prices, citing the combination of industry consolidation and the durability, at least so far, of Trump-era tariffs under Mr. Biden. The two have helped create what analysts from Citibank called “the best backdrop for steel in a decade.” Leon Topalian, the chief executive of Nucor, said the economy was showing an ability to absorb high steel prices, which reflect the high-demand nature of the recovery from the pandemic. “When Nucor is doing well, our customer segment is doing well,” Mr. Topalian said, “which means their customers are doing well.” For their part, steel workers are enjoying a respite after being hit hard by the pandemic. The city of Middletown in southwestern Ohio was spared the worst of the downturn, which saw 7,000 iron and steel production jobs disappear nationwide. Middletown Works — a sprawling Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant and one of the area’s most important employers — managed to avoid layoffs. But as demand has surged, activity and hours at the plant are picking up. “We’re definitely running good,” said Neil Douglas, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local Lodge 1943, which represents more than 1,800 workers at Middletown Works. The plant, Mr. Douglas said, is having trouble finding the additional workers to hire for positions that could earn as much as $85,000 a year. And the buzz at the plant is spilling over into the town. Mr. Douglas says he can’t walk into the home improvement center without running into someone from the mill who is embarking on a new project at home. “You can definitely feel in the town that people are using their disposable income,” he said. “When we’re running good and we’re making money, people are going to spend it in town for sure.” Source link Orbem News #boom #Herald #Makers #Prices #Soaring #Steel #Time

[politicaltheatre]

To Heal

And just like that, Joe Biden is president.

For all of the talk about “transition”, the moment he was sworn in, at long, precarious last, was everything. It made the election concrete, if not entirely in the eyes of enough Americans something set in stone.

Still, Biden’s journey from local Delaware politician to the Oval Office took him almost fifty years, an era that with the benefit of time and distance will be known both for its advances in technology and social equality as well as its exponentially widening imbalances of wealth and power. Biden’s career has covered the length of it, and, for better or worse, he will now be remembered as one of its central figures.

It wasn’t always so obvious that he would be. Looking back just to the end of the 20th century, he was entirely forgettable, a senator who had done little that anyone noticed, and what they did did little to impress. His best work, in that it achieved results, was done behind the scenes, working the backrooms and corridors of the Senate and House to get things done.

In that way, Joe Biden most resembles Lyndon Johnson when he served Texas in the House and then the Senate. Johnson, too, served as Vice President to a young and green president who, like Barack Obama, had only served part of his first term in the Senate before winning the presidency.

Johnson had a notoriously bad relationship with Kennedy, but his relationships in Congress helped Kennedy and then himself in getting civil rights legislation passed despite resistance from its racist members. However, those close, chummy relationships also hampered him in pushing that legislation as far as it needed, and still needs, to go.

When we look at the 1960s, we tend to think of the Space Age and going to the moon as the big, presidential achievements, downplaying things like civil rights, Medicare, and Medicaid, and that’s understandable. It was the peak of the Cold War, and money was spent where it would hurt our adversaries the most.

As much fun as it may have been to beat the Soviets to the moon - and creating technology that shapes our lives today -  this also had the effect of spending billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives (not to mention millions of Southeast Asian lives) in a catastrophic war in and around Vietnam.

Still, in those two things we were united as never before, excited and then indifferent as we followed the space program, and blindly patriotic and then angrily disillusioned as we followed Johnson’s war.

It wasn’t really his war, though. It was Eisenhower and Kennedy’s before him and Nixon’s after, and each of them had bipartisan support throughout, men and women elected to represent the best interest of their constituents. They all failed.

So, unity is important, and at a time such as this we should grateful to have a president putting that ideal out front as the core goal of his first, and possibly only, four years, but despite President Biden’s clear desire for us to come together and achieve, as he called it in his inaugural speech, “the most elusive of all things in a democracy”, unity as an end cannot be allowed to justify the means it takes to get there, not when the easiest way is simply to forget what has divided us so bitterly and so dangerously.

We would do better to heed these words from his previous speech, the one he as President-Elect gave just the night before: “To heal, we must remember. It’s hard sometimes to remember, but that’s how we heal.”

For us to remember what was done in the past four years and in the decades that led us to the riot on January 6th, we must not fear embarrassing those responsible or hurting the feelings of those with the power to stand in the way of remembering, not if our goal truly is to heal.

We must feel free to talk about it. We must feel free to call out those who seek to bury the past and their own accountability with it. We must feel free to challenge them when they, with the same depraved indifference that has led us to the public health and economic crises we now face, seek to keep us on the same path that led us here.

That’s the trouble with President Biden’s calls for “unity”. If he and his Democratic allies in Congress are the only ones actually willing to compromise, which was the case during the Obama administration, not only will he not be able to achieve more than getting us only partially back to where we were before Trump, he will not be able to prevent even worse from being done once he, too, is gone.

Biden will surely be tempted to restore America to what is was, perhaps even to that ideal of the “American Experiment”, and consider that a success. Congressional Republicans, however, will be looking to hold onto what they gained for themselves and their benefactors in the past four years, all of it, and will do everything in their reduced power to stand in Biden’s way.

It’s only been a day, but Trump’s minions have shown every intention of continuing on as they have been. In Congress, Republicans have already shown signs that they have every intention of using the same playbook against Biden that they used against Obama. Already, cabinet nominations are being blocked by Republicans hoping to gain leverage, and any notion of power sharing in the split Senate comes only with higher and higher price tags the longer negotiations drag on.

Make no mistake, now-former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s seeming repudiation of Donald Trump and his Capitol-attacking goon squad is not a sign of seeing the light and salvation of Unity. Rather, it signals something more significant: Donald Trump has served his purpose and now, in McConnell’s eyes, may be disposed of.

That’s who Mitch McConnell is. That is how he thinks. He uses people then throws them away. That, in his eyes, is what they’re for. That’s how he sees the world. He believes, or wants to believe, that we all think that same way, too.

This is the part of the right wing that strivers like Donald Trump never really understand, and that in no small way is why they all end the way they do. That Trump was popular and influential made him useful; now that Trump is neither, just a has-been, wannabe autocrat facing lawsuits and criminal charges, he’s a liability, useful only for one thing and that is being seen to be ostracized.

Odds are, McConnell stopped taking Trump’s calls weeks ago. He would have done well in Hollywood. Like Hollywood, Washington only ever changes when faced with scandal, and those brought down are only ever the ones who can no longer deliver profits. Its stars rise and fall in the same way. It’s the money they can make for you that counts.

McConnell has succeeded in politics because the culture of our politics rewards that same way of thinking. He is ruthless and calculating, which you and I may hate but which many in Washington and in his party in particular love.

That said, it can be defeated. Well, it can be mitigated. It won’t go away entirely. It will always be part of us. That, however, does mean we cannot teach ourselves the necessary lessons that will save us now and help us avoid repeating the same mistakes and falling into the same patterns that have led us so close to disaster.

For us heal, our health as a people and as a democracy cannot and must not be measured by our ability, pushed by so many Congressional Republicans in the past two weeks, simply to set what went wrong behind us and “move on”. We cannot allow that to be enough. If we merely close and bandage our wounds, so to speak, and attempt to move on, those wounds will fester and the infection will continue to spread.

If it seems wrong to compare all of this to a disease in the middle of a pandemic, it isn’t. The misinformation, divisiveness, and violence that were exploited on January 6th spread virally, yes? Politicians and business leaders have been profiting from that viral spread for years, yes?

We must think of this in those terms, so that we may recognize and understand what it was that has harmed us and, at its worst, threatened our survival. It still does, both literally and figuratively. What we learn we may spread the same way, though for less profit. Those lessons will be like cultural antibodies that, if we succeed, we may pass down to protect future generations.

If, then, we follow President-Elect Biden’s advice to remember and we resist attempts by McConnell and others to move on in order to forget, we stand a chance. That means calling these “dead-ender” attempts out for what they are and challenging them openly. If not, they will persist. Allowed to persist, they will thrive.

Take, for example, Georgia Representative Madison Cawthorn. At the tender age of 25, he has the name, good looks, and story of overcoming adversity to go far in national politics. He is also just as much of a craven, self-serving racist as the now-former president he vocally supported on January 6th, both before and after the riot.

Cawthorn essentially ran on a platform of protecting America’s White identity, its “heritage”, and was made to apologize for at least one openly racist ad during his campaign. He was, before and after that day, a proud supporter of those very same radicalized and delusional rioters who violently forced their way into the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags in the name of saving…the country that fought and defeated them both.

Yesterday, Cawthorn signed a letter with other incoming Republican representatives pledging to work with President Biden to achieve common goals and, through them, build unity. Given Cawthorn’s ongoing support of white supremacists and the violence of January 6th, how can anyone trust that?

During the Obama administration, McConnell and his House allies would condemn Democrats’ refusal to submit to their demands as a refusal to compromise. To them, that’s what “compromise” meant: submission by the other side.

It meant the same to them during George W. Bush’s administration and during Newt Gingrich’s run in Congress during the late 90s. That is what is will surely mean to Republicans in Congress now, and that surely include Cawthorn and those who share his “exceptional” world view.

To the right wing, “unity” is when all others submit. “Peace” is when all others submit. For them to compromise and commit to the peaceful sharing and exercise of power is an affront to the world they want to live in. They won’t do that. They just won’t, not willingly, not without Biden and the Democrats openly and fearlessly calling them out on it.

It can’t be enough to joke about it, as late night hosts and sketch shows did during the Bush years and early on in Trump’s. It can’t be enough to credulously accept lies and distractions, as network and print journalists did for so very, very long before Trump declared open warfare on them. It can’t be enough to rely on “the art of the possible” as an excuse for falling short. Again.

As trite as it sounds, healing does take time. In this case, that will be because it is our culture needs to change. The way we see some people as disposable needs to change. The way we accept less from those in power needs to change. And by “change”, we should mean, “stop”.

Our memory of these times will be essential to creating that change, the change that truly enables us to heal. Memories are a lot like antibodies. They are the basis of the stories we tell, the foundation of the worlds we build. Their strength and effectiveness at keeping us healthy and alive depends on how strongly and effectively we hold onto those memories of why we succeeded and, more importantly, why we failed. To forget is failure.

Never forget.

- Daniel Ward

[dipulb3]

The worst final popularity rating ever for a first lady belongs to Melania Trump

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/the-worst-final-popularity-rating-ever-for-a-first-lady-belongs-to-melania-trump/

The worst final popularity rating ever for a first lady belongs to Melania Trump

Melania Trump leaves the White House with the worst popularity rating for any first lady at the end of her term in polling history.

The latest Appradab/SSRS poll had Trump’s favorable rating at 42% to a 47% unfavorable rating. The 47% is the highest unfavorable rating we ever recorded for Trump. It’s also amazingly high from a historical perspective.

Traditionally, first ladies are nearly uniformly admired. The position is unelected and normally uncontroversial. It’s hard to be unpopular.

Take a look at the final Appradab and Gallup polls that asked about first ladies popularity since Pat Nixon. The average first lady’s final popularity rating before Trump was 71% with an unpopularity rating of 21%. That means the average net popularity rating for these first ladies was +50 points.

Now, the ratings for Nixon, Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter were taken before their husband’s final month in office and the questions asking about popularity were worded differently than Trump’s question. Even if we take these first ladies out of the equation, we get a very similar 70% favorable and 23% unfavorable average final rating since Nancy Reagan in 1989.

In fact, the only first lady to leave office with a net popularity rating below +40 points was Hillary Clinton. Her net favorability rating of +13 points (52% favorable and 39% unfavorable) in a January 2001 Appradab/Time/Yankelovich Partners poll still easily beat Trump’s final rating.

Remember, Clinton, unlike Trump, ran for her US Senate seat during her husband’s final year in the White House and was sworn in weeks before he departed the White House. She was also far more politically active in the White House, helping lead its push for health care reform. In other words, unlike most first ladies, Clinton was going to be seen in a partisan light.

Trump has not been anywhere near as involved in the day-to-day management of the White House. She’s usually not that visible, at least to most Americans.

Indeed, it’s not entirely clear how much Trump’s low ratings have to do with her in particular. Yes, she’s had some moments that blew up on social media, and she did break tradition (with her husband) in not welcoming the Biden family into the White House.

But Trump’s low ratings precede her time in office. She’s frequently featured relatively low net popularity ratings, dating back to when her husband was running for president in 2016. (She was not very well known then at all.)

It does seem that merely being associated with her husband has had a negative impact on her popularity.

Tempting as it might be to think that a husband’s unpopularity automatically means a first lady is unpopular too, this has not been the case historically.

When Richard Nixon was already well into the throes of the Watergate scandal in August 1973, 83% of Americans rated Pat Nixon a +1 or above on a favorability scale that ran from -5 to +5. Just 13% rated her a -1 or worse.

When Jimmy Carter’s approval rating was at a mere 32% in August 1979, Rosalynn Carter’s approval rating stood at 59% to a disapproval rating of 19%. The Carter comparison to Trump is especially interesting because Donald Trump’s current approval rating is quite similar to where Jimmy Carter’s was at that point in his presidency.

Originally, I thought the current first lady’s low popularity could be because of increasing polarization in our politics.

Laura Bush, however, proved that even in the modern era, a first lady can be vastly more popular than her husband. Her final favorable rating in a January 2009 Appradab/ORC poll was 67% to a 20% unfavorable rating. George W. Bush’s favorable rating was 35% in the same poll.

In fact, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama (69% favorable rating) both finished with popularity ratings about average for departing first ladies.

Of course, no first lady this century has ever left office with the 85% favorable rating of Barbara Bush in 1993.

My guess is that incoming first lady Jill Biden won’t either. Her favorable rating was 58% to a 29% unfavorable rating.

But just like her husband, Biden starts off a lot more popular than her predecessor.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Greetings, people. Today we’re going to have a super nice and respectful chat about a recent column from David Brooks of The New York Times.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): …

Nate drank his Gatorade.

micah: The column: “The End of the Two-Party System.” Can someone give us a fair summary of Brooks’ argument?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The summary is that we need the Reasonable Center Party, which happens to have exactly the same policy positions that Brooks has and would be enormously successful if only anyone bothered to create it.

micah: I said “fair.”

clare.malone: Brooks brings up the rise of basically what he’s categorizing as tribal politics, and compares it to European trends from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

He says that, at some point, conservatives and liberals will split themselves between true philosophical conservatives and liberals, and then the people who are the tribal conservatives and tribal liberals.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): A more generous summary might be that Brooks feels the Republican Party is too Trumpish and the Democratic Party is too stuck on race- and gender based-politics, and we need another party for people who don’t like those two ideologies.

micah: OK, I don’t want this chat to just be bashing Brooks’s argument; I want to talk about third parties. So let’s get the argument-demolishing out of the way …

There’s a ton wrong in this article, right?

natesilver: I mean, the main problem is that he doesn’t understand how parties work.

Which is a pretty big problem if you’re writing a column about parties.

I like Brooks, by the way (I really do) — this just wasn’t one of his best efforts.

perry: So, first, he points to the good old days of the 1990s. But as Julia Azari has written, we’ve always had very intense political conflict, it’s just more partisan now. Moreover, the 1990s were not great — as we knew back then but are learning more now — if you were, say, a woman trying to advance in many fields or an African-American who dealt with the criminal justice system.

Second, the pre-Trump Republican Party he describes skips over the racialized politics of, for example, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

micah: Yeah, this description of the GOP seems waaaaay off:

In the years after Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party was defined by its abundance mind-set. The key Republican narratives were capitalist narratives about dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions. The Wall Street Journal editorial page was the most important organ of conservative opinion. The party’s views on other issues, like immigration, were downstream from confidence in the abundant marketplace and the power of the American idea.

What about all the racialized law-and-order stuff?

clare.malone: My real problem with the article is that he doesn’t really prove his case.

He says at the very end of it, in a single paragraph:

Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.

But wait … will they realize this? What about hyper-partisanship? And check this out from Pew:

natesilver: The article also skips over the importance of “values voters” and the evangelical movement to the George W. Bush coalition. (And to the Reagan coalition too.)

micah: But, Nate, explain how you think the article misunderstands how parties work.

natesilver: Du. Ver. Ger’s. Law.

Bam!

OK, that’s a pretty obscure reference. But its point is that party systems are heavily influenced by electoral structures.

You usually get two major parties, or maybe three, in first-past-the-post systems like the U.S. uses. Those European systems he’s talking about — where you have lots of viable parties — mostly have proportional representation.

It should really be “Duverger’s reasonably reliable empirical regularity” and not “Duverger’s law,” but it’s a pretty useful heuristic.

clare.malone: What a sentence.

My question is, when does Brooks think all of this is going to happen?

That is, is this something he thinks will come down the pike in 2020 (aka, David Brooks is a stan for Kasich 2020)?

Or is this something 25 years in the future?

natesilver: It will happen once more people read his columns and join the Reasonable Center.

micah: OK, so he sorta bungles parties and bungles recent U.S. political history, but let’s talk about the force he thinks will spur a viable third party …

Isn’t his argument like: People are getting really partisan and so therefore people will break out of partisanship?

That seems … wrong?

Or am I misunderstanding the argument?

natesilver: It’s not necessarily wrong to think that partisanship could abate. It does tend to ebb and flow. And it’s at a high end of the historical range now.

clare.malone: It’s really hard to build a party structure — state-level offices/organizers/money — which is one of the reasons that people tend to stay within the two major parties.

Like, if you wanted to launch a legitimate third-party bid, it would not be something that could happen overnight. The Libertarian Party has been trying for decades, and they’ve only recently been racking up margins that made a dent.

natesilver: And/but/also, the two-party system is pretty adaptable. Does the Republican Party under Trump look a lot different than the Republican Party under Reagan? Sure. But that’s why parties work!

clare.malone: Right. Parties shift priorities. The modern Republican Party emerged under Herbert Hoover. So maybe it won’t break apart now, it’ll just shift to a new iteration.

perry: I was thinking out loud about this before the chat, but the last new, big major party in America was in the 1850s, right? Lincoln’s Republican Party. It replaced the Whigs in many ways.

Trump’s rise is a major crisis to Republicans like Brooks and lots of other scholars who view Trump as kind of the worst possible type of president. So the idea is a Gov. John Kasich-like figure rises to create a new kind of party that is an alternative to Trumpism. I didn’t think that was impossible in October 2016. But it seems much more implausible now, since Republican voters broadly like Trump and it’s not clear that stopping Trump is some clarion call for people outside of the Democratic Party and the Acela corridor.

micah: Yeah, so that’s key: Is there demand/desire among Americans for a third party?

natesilver: Again, a lot of this is just that David Brooks had a party (the GWB-era GOP) that he once mostly agreed with and now he doesn’t have one. Which is annoying for David Brooks but doesn’t really provide much evidence either way in terms of broader public sentiment. There’s been a gradual uptick in the number of people who identify as independent, but it’s really quite gradual and quite mild:

micah: But that’s party identification … people do say they want a third party!

perry: I think there’s demand for changes in politics: a more populist economic strain and a more nativist strain. But it feels like the former is happening in both parties (Trump, Bernie Sanders) and the latter in the GOP with Trump.

In other words, we are seeing huge changes in politics, but they are within in the parties. (And in the opposite direction of where Brooks is, since he is not populist or nativist.)

natesilver: Yeah, exactly. Basically, Brooks is a Democrat now and doesn’t want to admit it.

micah: Explain that Gallup chart though.

clare.malone: I do think it’s fascinating that Americans say they want a third party.

And yet … where is it?

Maybe if the U.S. had less money involved in politics, you’d see more parties.

natesilver: I wrote something once about how Trump himself was essentially a third-party candidate. His platform during the campaign was quite different than John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s — although he has arguably governed as a much more traditional Republican.

But part of the issue that Americans don’t want a third party — they want their third party.

perry: So, here’s a smarter take on third parties from Lee Drutman at Vox:

Yes, third parties in American politics are kamikaze missions. Because of our single-winner plurality system of elections, third parties almost never gain representation.

And yes, a serious third-party conservative challenge to Republicans would help Democrats in the short term, by siphoning off votes from Republicans.

But each month that the Republican Party has a leader who can’t conceal his overt racism, who calls the media the enemy of the people, is a month in which voters who identify as Republican have to update their worldview to fit with their partisan identity. Only losing, and losing bigly, will break this Republican partisan trajectory.

One more excerpt from Drutman:

Perhaps you like the idea of starting a Conscientious Conservative Party, but don’t like the idea of losing and tipping the balance of power decisively to Democrats. In that case, maybe you could get on board with changing electoral laws to make it easier for third parties.

Perhaps you could get behind the Fair Representation Act, introduced last year in the House, which would move us toward a proportional voting system by creating multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting. That means that even if the Conscientious Conservative Party could only get about 15 percent nationally, it would get some seats in the House — possibly enough to be a pivotal voting bloc for control of the chamber.

Or if that feels too bold, how about just straight-up ranked-choice voting, which would give people the chance to vote for the Conscientious Conservative Party and then list either the Democrat or the Republican as their second choice, ensuring that they could express their true preference without wasting their vote, and putting some pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to court Conscientious Conservatives to earn their second-choice votes.

The point is, third-party votes don’t have to be wasted votes. They’re only wasted votes because our electoral system makes them so.

natesilver: Yeah, look, I don’t want to go overboard in totally dismissing the idea of a third party. Also, independent presidential candidates can sometimes succeed irrespective of a more sustainable third party.

But as Perry says, a lot of the changes happen within parties. And independents fall into maybe three different categories — including lots of people on the “far left” and the “far right,” not just Reasonable Centrists.

micah: No one has yet explained to me what gives with that Gallup chart, though. If 61 percent of people think a third party is needed, what’s getting in the way?

Brooks is speaking for the masses!

natesilver: Because among that 61 percent, there’s 21 percent who want the Reasonable Center Party, 20 percent who want the Green Party, and 20 percent who want the America First Party

clare.malone: I mean, there’s no high-profile candidate from a third party. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are too fringe. And their parties don’t have enough money. So no one except people who read sites like FiveThirtyEight ever vote for them.

micah: Don’t stereotype our readers!

clare.malone: Sorry, readers.

micah: Let’s do a poll.

If you're a @FiveThirtyEight reader, please answer this question:

Have you ever voted for a third party?

— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) February 15, 2018

Anyway, how could we get more parties? Structural change, as Drutman wrote?

perry: I think so — it’s the structure of our electoral system that gets in the way.

natesilver: Yeah, see, Brooks should really be writing about the need for ranked-choice voting.

You’d probably wind up with slightly more fluid, centrist parties, although maybe not with more parties.

perry: Well, the parties would have to vote for structural change, and I don’t see that happening.

I think I could see an Emmanuel Macron-style situation happening in the U.S.

clare.malone: Macron is basically a Michael Bloomberg type but with less experience. Way less.

natesilver: Yeah. I’d put the odds of “independent candidate wins one of the next four presidential elections” quite a bit higher than “there’s a new major party within 16 years.”

perry: If, say, Sanders and Trump are the nominees in 2020, could the Reasonable Centrist Party do better? Macron is a centrist in policy but has a personality cult around him. Or had one.

clare.malone: I mean, if Sanders wanted, he could lean into the Democratic Socialist Party thing and try to build that out. It probably wouldn’t yield him the presidency in his lifetime, but it would perhaps bear fruit decades down the line. A delayed-gratification legacy.

micah: Sanders doesn’t seem the type for delaying gratification.

perry: Take Arnold Schwarzenegger in California in that very odd California 2003 environment. I felt like he could have won as an independent.

natesilver: But in the case where Sanders has won the Democratic nomination, he’d look like a more “traditional” Democrat by the time the general election rolled around. And the Democratic Party is moving in his direction anyway.

clare.malone: Right. Sanders realized that you need the big party in order to succeed. Even if you hate their guts.

natesilver: Could someone more radical than Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Maybe. Or a Sanders who also had lots of personal liabilities?

micah: OK, so if we all think that it’s much more likely that one of the two major parties will shift in a big way than that a third party will emerge, what could that shift(s) look like?

perry: Those shifts already happened to some extent. And the people who lost out on the them are the Jim Webb types in the Democratic Party and the Bill Kristol/Brooks types in the GOP.

micah: One hundred percent agree on GOP, but are we really ready to declare the Democratic Party fully shifted too?

In other words, is asymmetric polarization more symmetrical now?

clare.malone: Oh, Democrats got stuff a-brewing — though because they lost, it’s a less dramatic fight. But the party, in addition to some demographic changes, is much more liberal than it used to be:

natesilver: Neither party has fully shifted, but the Democratic Party is earlier in its process of shifting, I think.

perry: I’m just having a really hard time seeing the Kristol/Brooks wing retaking the GOP. I think, like Nate said, those people are basically Democrats now. And they should try to push the Democrats to be less-identity-ish.

natesilver: In terms of the Democratic Party shifting, the key question isn’t, “What does David Brooks want?” but, “What do young black and Hispanic voters want?”

micah: So, yeah, you two just identified the tension there, right?

clare.malone: Big ol’ tent, huh?

Big enough for Brooks and Kristol.

micah: It would have to be a huge tent!

Brooks describes the Republican Party of the 1980s without one mention of race — getting Brooks-esque voters in the same tent with liberal Democrats is gonna be tricky.

clare.malone: I mean, those guys are basically European conservatives, to go back to the Brooks point about European politics. And their being in the party for a while could, in 10 years, push the more left-leaning people to start their own thing.

Eventually the tent will get too crowded and some people will have to go to the overflow section.

natesilver: Right now, opposition to Trump unites white urban neo-liberals with white democratic socialists with black and Hispanic voters. You’d have a lot of tensions within that coalition down the road, though.

perry: Brooks and the other conservative anti-Trump voices have resonance, in part, because some Democrats at the elite level are wary of the identity stuff too but can’t say so publicly. (Let’s say Sanders and Biden, if you look at their immediate post-election comments.) But I think a party that is only about 25 percent white men doesn’t really care what Brooks thinks. The Democratic Party is going to get more Sanders-like, I think, in the short term. And this is going to frustrate people like Brooks, who should become Democrats. But could Biden win the 2020 nomination on a kind of unity platform? Maybe.

It feels like Brooks’s best hope is that the Democratic Party, in some kind of “Save America from Trump” move, embraces a style of politics that Jeff Flake, John McCain, etc., agree with but does not piss off young voters, minorities, women, socialists, Sanders types.

In other words, the parties really sort along immigration lines — the people with Trumpish views on race/immigration in one party, the others in a second party.

natesilver: Obama, in some ways, united all these different groups together in 2008 because George W. Bush was so unpopular. So if Trump is really, really unpopular by 2020, a Biden type could do great.

In the long run, I don’t think you can avoid these tensions, though.

perry: That’s a great point. The 2008 Obama campaign was a kind of unity ticket. He couldn’t recreate that in 2012.

micah: OK, and to wrap up: Is there any chance that the Republican Party becomes the party Brooks wants it to be?

clare.malone: That’s a negatory. At least in any sort of near-term future. I don’t think you can just forget about the forces in the party that manifested Trump.

perry: If Trump and Putin had a July 2016 phone call during which Trump told him to hack Podesta’s email, that call becomes public and Trump is impeached and removed from office … then maybe.

micah: See, I disagree with that, Perry.

perry: You think Putin made the hacking suggestion first?

micah: LOL.

The Trumpism in Republicanism predates Trump and — to a first approximation — would postdate him too, wouldn’t it?

natesilver: I’m on Perry’s side. If Trump is perceived to be a failure, there could be a reasonably sharp counterreaction to Trump. (Although, I’m thinking “failure” more in the sense of “he loses re-election,” not “he gets impeached,” which raises a different set of issues.)

micah: So, if Trump loses re-election, Republican primary voters suddenly move to the middle on immigration?

natesilver: STRAW MAN MICAH IS BACK

micah: Whose team are you on, Clare?

clare.malone: I’m not sure about my team. I guess I could see, in the case of a Trump flameout, Trumpians getting completely steamrollered by national establishment figures.

But then you’ve got a part of your base that is wildly unhappy with you. I guess they either leave or just become pains in your asses for the rest of time.

I’m not sure I’m on a team. I’m agnostic.

natesilver: Voters (maybe not voters in the GOP, but voters overall) are already moving left on immigration. The reaction to Trump has been fairly thermostatic, as the political scientists like to say.

micah: What does thermostatic mean?

natesilver: Public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of the president’s policy preferences.

perry: But while I don’t think the Republican Party will change in the short term, I don’t rule out a strong third-party candidate doing well in 2020. There is some broad dissatisfaction with American politics that someone could capitalize on. Someone more like Oprah than Kasich, but I think it won’t be either one of them. I don’t know who that person is.

micah: OK, I’ll say this: Partisanship is sooooooo strong now that maybe it allows for more ideological/policy movement and flexibility. We’ve seen Democrats and Republicans flip on the FBI. We’ve seen Republicans flip on free trade, Russia and Putin.

So, in that sense, maybe it’s easier to imagine the GOP becoming more to Brooks’ liking pretty quickly.

If, in three years, a set of circumstances comes together so that the “right” set of partisan positions for Republicans is Brooks-ian, I don’t really have much doubt that partisan voters would support those positions — in the same way Republicans became anti-free-trade almost overnight.

clare.malone: I’ll buy that somewhat.

The FBI thing is really interesting. A good point.

perry: That’s a good ending point, I basically agree with Micah’s take there.

natesilver: Yeah, I hate to say it, but I basically agree with Micah too. The very intense partisanship we see in the country today is a sign that the parties are quite healthy, whether or not it’s good for democracy.

micah: OMG!

Let me just marinate in this moment for a little while.

[back-and-totheleft]

His anger is his art

Oliver Stone is worried that Donald Trump doesn’t get enough sleep.

“He doesn’t sleep a lot. He doesn’t take good care of his health. Don’t you think there’s some pile-up, if you don’t sleep for several years like this?”

I feel a movie coming on. Stone, after all, made W, a film about President George W Bush; this one, perhaps, could be The Don. Sure enough, he seems to be thinking about it.

“There’s nothing that could quite capture this fellow. He’s quite a whirlwind, a fascinating dramatic character. Shakespearean too, in the sense that he’s so emotional — at times he creates a storm, almost purposely every day, to keep the energy going. He creates a storm inside himself. He’s King Lear in a strange way too — which daughter loves me more?”

He’s also thinking about the murder of George Floyd, but he thinks a black director should make it.

We are Zooming. He is in Los Angeles in a large book-lined room, I am not. He’s not lost his looks — sort of handsome, friendly but in your face — and his conversation is warmly attentive.

The talk of possible films is all Stone business as usual, running towards the news and the gunfire, especially if it’s American. At 73, his soul is still that of the gonzo movie-maker who turned out almost unbearably violent films such as Platoon and Salvador. But he did them because he hates film and television violence. He learnt about the real thing when, in 1967, he joined up and volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He left garlanded with honours but angry.

“I was known for my violent screenplays, but it came from a background of real violence. There was a lot of it I saw, and I wanted to depict it accurately. I really hated that. All the TV shows — 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Same old bullshit. I hated the fake violence, so I was trying in my movies to move away from Rambo bullshit. It just doesn’t look as good as it does in the movies; it never does.”

And now he’s written an autobiography, Chasing the Light, covering his life up to 1986. He was 40 then; Platoon had just been released and, earlier that year, Salvador. Platoon won four Oscars, one for best director, and Salvador was nominated for two, one for best writing — Stone co-wrote it. It was, as he says, “a remarkable two-film journey from the bottom back to the top of the Hollywood mountain”. He had arrived, he had been accepted. The book ends with him trailing clouds of glory.

“I’d managed to crest into the light,” he writes. “Money, fame, glory and honor, it was all there at the same time and space. I had to move now. I’d been waiting too many years to make films. Time had wings. I wanted to make one after the other in a race against that time — I suppose really a race against myself in a hall of mirrors of my own making.”

Will there, I wonder, be another volume?

“Yes, of course. Why not? I think it’s important for me to at least come to grips with things because it goes so fast. You don’t really get it all. You don’t — one event after the other. One movie after the other. You’re always dealing with people, people, people. It’s hard to have that solitary space.”

He kept diaries “to understand myself, to understand what happened”. As a result the book is phenomenally well detailed. It opens with an account of filming a scene from Salvador. It’s a cavalry charge being shot in Mexico; everything that could go wrong seems to be going wrong, and the money — where on earth is the money? But somehow he pulls it off. Reading that made my head spin: how could anybody live with such levels of risk? Reading his diaries made him ask the same question about himself.

“I always knew I was bold, but I never realised that I was crazy too and risked a lot. At 39, with nothing in my future, my father dying, my mother dependent on me, a new wife, a new baby — and I go and put everything I have into this idea, this crazy idea to shoot this movie.”

He has, as the critic Pauline Kael noted, a divided sensibility: “He’s working outside the industry, in freedom, but he’s got all this Hollywood muck in his soul.” She never liked his films, but he accepts this judgment. The book also stands up her analysis — one minute he’s the guerrilla film-maker, the next he’s lapping up the glamour, the drugs and the schmoozing with stars. But the real divisions are much deeper than that. The first is the division between his father and mother.

He was born in New York. His father, Louis, was a high-ranking soldier turned stockbroker; his mother, Jacqueline, an elegant, beautiful French lady Louis met while fighting with the allies in Europe. She loved parties and glamour — Stone says she would have loved him to make a flowery romantic film. His evocation of her character is laden with love for her. Louis was more complex, serially unfaithful and constantly at war with the demon money.

One day, when he was 16, Stone had a phone call at his private boarding school: his parents were separating. It was a pivotal moment.

“I was naive. I thought it was a happy, loving family and I was very privileged to have that. The divorce was cruel in the way that it was done. It was brutal, and it shocked me because I was naive. The whole world fell apart. They split, and there’s nothing else. There’s no brothers, there’s no sisters. There’s no home. And as a result you become an orphan of the storm. If Charles Dickens were writing it, it might be an Oliver Twist story … I used to get kidded that my name was Oliver. And maybe I did feel an identification with him.”

His education faltered. He went to Yale but never completed his degree. At 18 he started wandering the world and at 20 he enlisted, then apparently forced himself to see the worst things that could be seen in Vietnam. The book starts 10 years later when he is at his lowest ebb. He speaks of himself in the third person while talking about this moment.

“He confronts his failures in life. He sees that he hasn’t gotten his dream, what he wanted to do. And his grandmother dies. He had gone to see her on this deathbed in Paris and he talks to her. And she communicates to him, and she tells him how he must live his life the way he is doing it, he’s following his instincts. And she loved me, and she’d always loved me and believed in me. That was a big thing. Something happened at 30 with her death. And I became more mature, and my success started to flow from there.”

His attempts to reconstruct a family have been patchy. His present wife is his third, and he has two sons and a daughter. There’s a moving moment in the book when he holds one of his sons, Sean, in his arms.

“If ever there was proof,” he writes, “we are born with a sweet nature, this was it; the veils come later.”

He has a Wordsworthian sense that we arrive trailing clouds of glory, but somehow the world takes all that away. So does he think we are born good? “Yeah, I think so. A baby is innocent, beautiful. You see it in baby animals. They don’t know what the world is.”

The second division is America. He came back, he says, “very divided and alienated”.

“Nobody was walking around over there saying: I’m against the war. No. A lot of us knew the war was bullshit. Certainly the black soldiers knew that, they didn’t really believe in it.”

Stone became an American exceptionalist. Usually that means somebody who regards the US as an especially good country; Stone regards it as especially bad.

“The divide was growing when I came back and that’s still with us. You see it coming down to us to this very day. We have a law-and-order candidate in Mr Trump. He talks like a fool, but he talks like many people — more military, more power, more application of force, more violence.”

From Salvador and Platoon onwards, Stone’s work became an angry charge sheet, an indictment of US postwar politics. His 1989 film, Born on the Fourth of July, attacked the treatment of veterans; JFK (1991) embraces conspiracy theories about the death of Kennedy; Heaven & Earth in 1993 skewered the behaviour of Americans in Vietnam, and so on. Postwar American history became, for Stone, a descent into insanity.

“America just goes mad after the Second World War — it just goes mad. Under Eisenhower the beginning of this madness sets in. The question we have to ask ourselves now is: was there really an enemy? Russia was not the threat to Europe we pretended it to be. And, for that matter, China neither. And we created this postwar scenario that was culminating in this economic concept that had come out of the Depression, that we cannot go back to the old way again and have to keep going. We have to put money into this military economy, to keep the country pumped. There’s been no end to that, no end at all. It just keeps going up. It doesn’t matter who the president is in the end. It’s the system. And no one can beat that system. No one can control it.”

This is, you will gather, a tremendous book — readable, funny and harrowing. It’s also full of movie-making gossip, scandal and fun. If you want to know what working with a truly difficult actor is like, read his account of handling James Woods on the set of Salvador. Nevertheless, Stone sticks with Woods because “he is a genius”. Also if you want to know what it’s like to be so intoxicated at a Golden Globes ceremony that your speech is so bad and almost denies you an Oscar, then you need this book.

There is much to disagree with about Stone’s politics — America’s iniquities in the postwar period are nothing next to China’s — but his anger is his art. It’s a way of balancing out the deep divisions in his character and his feelings.

For the moment he is not too worried about the pandemic, but he is taking on a new cause: nuclear power.

“The virus seems to me the ongoing business of history. It’s just... there’s so many viruses. I don’t see it as an existential threat to the world. It’s more of a mood thing. No, I think the real issue is global warming.”

He is making a documentary, A Brighter Future, about the need to deploy nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. “Renewables,” he says, “cannot solve it.”

There he goes again, running towards the news and the gunfire, like Oliver Twist always asking for more.

-Bryan Appleyard, “Oliver Stone interview: the Platoon director and Vietnam vet on his new memoir about his early days in Hollywood,” The Sunday Times, July 12 2020 [x]

[opedguy]

Former Intel Officials Denounce Trump

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Aug. 21, 2020.--Now that 77-year-old former Vice President and Democrat nominee Joe Biden finished his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, the DNC followed up with a letter from 70 former GOP intel officials denouncing Trump’s foreign policy.  These are intel officials that gave you the Iraq War, Obama’s eight-year Saudi-led proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and backed toppling Libyan Col. Muammar Gaddafi, sending Libya and surrounding North African states into terrorism hell. Yes, those same intel officials participated under 64-year-old former CIA Director John Brennan and 79-year-old former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in the illegal counterintelligence investigation of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.  “We are profoundly concerned about the course of our nation under the leadership of Donald Trump,” the open letter wrote.  

           Many of the intel officials signing on to the open letter denouncing Trump are under investigation by 70-year-old Atty. Gen. William Barr and 70-year-old U.S. Atty. John Durham (R-Conn.), currently working with a grand jury to determine criminal liability for investigating Trump’s 2016 campaign.  Those same intel officials denouncing Trump readily backed 72-year-old former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s paid opposition research AKA “the Steele Dossier,” a compendium Russian disinformation but, more importantly, pure fabrication by Steele, a former MI6 agent, who made up rubbish for Hillary against Trump, then proceeded to delete all his so-called “underlying sources.”  Whatever flimsy sources of “intel” Steele used, they were most likely self-fabricated lies about Trump, alleged, unproven ties to the Kremlin, something disproven by the 22-month, $40 million Special Counsel investigation.    

         Yes, the disgruntled intel community denounced Trump because he’s exposed them as frauds, that spent four years backing the Russian hoax, making wild accusations against a sitting president.  Whether admitted to or not, the intel community, certainly federal law enforcement under the FBI, has been corrupted by politics, working day-and-night to defeat Trump in the Nov. 3 presidential election, just like they did in 2016, that ultimately backfired.  Hillary blamed everyone for her loss, except herself.  She certainly blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Biden’s speech last night slammed Trump for cozying up to America’s enemies, like Putin, something he vowed not to do. Like former President Barack Obama, Biden’s committed to an eventual confrontation militarily with the Russian Federation, something that would have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. and international community.     

        Trump has “gravely damaged” the intel community’s credibility, not, as the letter said, U.S. national security.  Trump questioned the Iraq War as a candidate, directly confronting former President George W. Bush’s judgment, while he battled former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fl.), whose family was all in the Iraq War.  All of Bush’s men, including 83-year-old former Secretary of State Colin Powell, 75-year-old former CIA Director Michael Hayden and 73-year-old former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, all backed the Iraq War, though Hagel finally saw the light too late.  Yet, the former intel community despises Trump because his administration has kept the U.S. out of more wasteful Mideast Wars, something Obama and Biden didn’t do.  Biden doesn’t want to talk about backing for eight years the Saudi-led proxy war against al-Assad, spending billions of taxpayer money on a complete failure.     

        After watching his campaign wiretapped by 60-year-old former FBI Director James Comey and the national security community, Trump doesn’t have much trust for the FBI or intel community.  Saying Trump “solicited foreign influence,” the letter beats a dead horse after 75-year-old former FBI Director Special Counsel Robert Mueller said otherwise March 23, 2019.  Saying Trump “aligned himself with dictators,” the letter offers no proof only wild allegations.  Was Trump supposed to continue the Cold War strategy of Obama, itching for confrontation?  Trump kept that country out of any foreign military involvements over the last four years.  Trump “undermined the rule of law,” read the open letter, more a political document written by the DNC.  Who undermined the rule of law, watching Obama’s White House and intel community illegally wiretap Trump 2016 presidential campaign?        

     When you look at the so-called open letter, it reads no differently than a composite of all the vitriolic attacks at the DNC convention against Trump.  If it’s really written by intel officials or military leaders, where’s the line between politics and the wild allegations?  “Joe Biden has the character, experience and temperament to lead this nation,” read the letter, not talking about how he enriched his 50-year-old  son Hunter while serving as Obama’s point-man on Ukraine.  Biden’s character is perfect for the intel community that backed the Iraq War, Syria War and Libyan War, spreading terrorism around the Middle East, creating the worst humanitarian crisis since WW II.  Yes, Trump ruffled the feathers of the status quo exactly as he promised campaigning tin 2016, to so-called “clear the swamp.”  Trump’s found out the hard way what happens when you rock the boat and it’s not pretty.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[kingofswedenyass]

answering every question by walden west

200: My crush’s name is:

I have a gf..

199: I was born in:

1776

198: I am really:

gay

197: My cellphone company is:

vodaphone

196: My eye color is:

Monika green

195: My shoe size is:

6

194: My ring size is:

idk

193: My height is:

5 foot 5

192: I am allergic to:

some soaps and asprin

191: My 1st car was:

never lol

190: My 1st job was:

professional weeb

189: Last book you read:

the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime

by Mark Haddon

188: My bed is:

blue!

187: My pet:

a cat

186: My best friend:

see above

185: My favorite shampoo is:

pantenne

184: Xbox or ps3:

ps3

183: Piggy banks are:

cute but unnecessary

182: In my pockets:

a pound coin and some chocolate

181: On my calendar:

2nd January 2018

180: Marriage is:

dank

179: Spongebob can:

go fuck himself little twat

178: My mom:

is great<3

177: The last three songs I bought were?

I don’t buy songs lol

176: Last YouTube video watched:

comment awards

175: How many cousins do you have?

1st cousins: 4

2nd cousins:3

3rd cousins: 11

174: Do you have any siblings?

4

173: Are your parents divorced?

yup

172: Are you taller than your mom?

yup

171: Do you play an instrument?

nope lol

170: What did you do yesterday?

went to the beach

[ I Believe In ] 169: Love at first sight:

sure

168: Luck:

mathematically

167: Fate:

maybe

166: Yourself:

lol nope

165: Aliens:

could be but probably just like bacteria

164: Heaven:

nope

163: Hell:

nope

162: God:

nope

161: Horoscopes:

nope

160: Soul mates:

like intense love?

159: Ghosts:

eh nah

158: Gay Marriage:

yes dad

157: War:

nope

156: Orbs:

why

155: Magic:

uh

[ This or That ] 154: Hugs or Kisses:

kisses

153: Drunk or High:

high

152: Phone or Online:

online

151: Red heads or Black haired:

black haired

150: Blondes or Brunettes:

brunettes149: Hot or cold:

hot

148: Summer or winter:

summer

147: Autumn or Spring:

autumn

146: Chocolate or vanilla:

vanilla

145: Night or Day:

night

144: Oranges or Apples:

oranges

143: Curly or Straight hair:

curly(mine is straight)

142: McDonalds or Burger King:

burger king

141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate:

white all the way!(that sounds wrong)

140: Mac or PC:

pc

139: Flip flops or high heals:

flip flops fall off

138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor:

sweet and poor cuz i’m morally obliged to

137: Coke or Pepsi:

coke me up dad

136: Hillary or Obama:

obama

135: Burried or cremated:

cremated

134: Singing or Dancing:

singing

133: Coach or Chanel:

coach

132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks:

idk who they are.

*googles them*

ok kate mcphee that taylor dude looks like that guy from bake off

131: Small town or Big city:

big city

130: Wal-Mart or Target:

im from the uk but target

129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler:

same difference

128: Manicure or Pedicure:

manicure

127: East Coast or West Coast:

well in Britain the west is scummy af so east

126: Your Birthday or Christmas:

christmas duh

125: Chocolate or Flowers:

flowers

124: Disney or Six Flags:

diseny

123: Yankees or Red Sox:

i don’t know baseball lol

[ Here’s What I Think About ] 122: War:

expensive and pretentious

121: George Bush:

idk was in the simpsons once

120: Gay Marriage:

yaaas

119: The presidential election:

a mess

118: Abortion:

pro choice

117: MySpace:

im not from 2009 thx

116: Reality TV:

trash! I watch REAL entertainment

( anime)

115: Parents:

they could have like not fed you so thanks i guess

114: Back stabbers:

ugh 113: Ebay:

helpful

112: Facebook:

mom

111: Work:

leads to productivity and self worth and stops me from starving

110: My Neighbors:

nice people

109: Gas Prices:

what is this gas you speak of? I only fill my car with petrol

108: Designer Clothes:

it costs more because it has somebody else’s name on it

107: College:

hard but yay

106: Sports:

no

105: My family:

seem like nice people

104: The future:

scares me

[ Last time I ] 103: Hugged someone:

yesterday

102: Last time you ate:

about 20 hours ago

101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile:

I live in a tiny town, I see every body I have ever met like every day

100: Cried in front of someone:

two days ago

99: Went to a movie theater:

like in July

98: Took a vacation:

October

97: Swam in a pool:

like in June

96: Changed a diaper:

a month ago

95: Got my nails done:

never whats nails idk

94: Went to a wedding:

2015

93: Broke a bone:

2015

92: Got a peircing:

lol never i am a soft boi

91: Broke the law:

a couple weeks ago

90: Texted:

like ten minuets ago

[ MISC ]

89: Who makes you laugh the most:

cats

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is:

the fridge

87: The last movie I saw:

the titanic

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most:

death

85: The thing i’m not looking forward to:

the end of the holidays

84: People call me:

gay

83: The most difficult thing to do is:

breathe

82: I have gotten a speeding ticket:

never i don’t drive

81: My zodiac sign is:

leo! (rawr)

80: The first person i talked to today was:

myself

79: First time you had a crush:

princess tiana

78: The one person who i can’t hide things from:

nobody lol

77: Last time someone said something you were thinking:

i was thinking about good morning vietnam

76: Right now I am talking to:

nobody

75: What are you going to do when you grow up:

nevr speak to anybody again other than the pizza delivery guy

74: I have/will get a job:

crying professionally

73: Tomorrow:

I am going to paint my nails

72: Today:

literally did nothing

71: Next Summer:

sleep

70: Next Weekend:

cry

69: I have these pets:

a cat and a dog

68: The worst sound in the world:

my fucking voice

67: The person that makes me cry the most is:

my sibling

66: People that make you happy:

my gf and keira nightly

65: Last time I cried:

two days ago

64: My friends are:

nobody lol

63: My computer is:

an acer windows 7

62: My School:

some Christian bs

61: My Car:

don’t got one

60: I lose all respect for people who:

are mean to others

59: The movie I cried at was:

none

58: Your hair color is:

brown

57: TV shows you watch:

the big bang theory, steven universe

56: Favorite web site:

tumblr

55: Your dream vacation:

month long festival

54: The worst pain I was ever in was:

I had a really bad asthma attack

53: How do you like your steak cooked:

i’m a vegetarian

52: My room is:

a fucking mess

51: My favorite celebrity is:

me

50: Where would you like to be:

spain

49: Do you want children:

lol no

48: Ever been in love:

yes. my cat

47: Who’s your best friend:

nobody lol

46: More guy friends or girl friends:

girl cuz I'm a ladies man

45: One thing that makes you feel great is:

coming home after ages

44: One person that you wish you could see right now:

Alexander Hamilton so I can hug him

43: Do you have a 5 year plan:

fuck no

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die:

nope

41: Have you pre-named your children:

i hate kids but of course I'd name them daddy and senpai

40: Last person I got mad at:

myself

39: I would like to move to:

new york

38: I wish I was a professional:

sugar daddy

[ My Favorites ] 37: Candy:

Reese’s buttercups

36: Vehicle:

attack helecopter

35: President:

aLexANder hAmiLtOn amirite

34: State visited:

the solid state of matter

33: Cellphone provider:

Ajit pai

32: Athlete:

Jake Paul

31: Actor:

Jake Paul

30: Actress:

Jake Paul

29: Singer:

Jake Paul

28: Band:

steam powered giraffe

27: Clothing store:

ebay

26: Grocery store:

tesco

25: TV show:

black mirror

24: Movie:

Ferris Bueler’s day off

23: Website:

tumblr

22: Animal:

Totoro

21: Theme park:

Diseny land

20: Holiday:

Halloween

19: Sport to watch:

Quiddich

18: Sport to play:

professional nose nuzzleing competition

17: Magazine:

tube nooz

16: Book:

the portrait of markov

15: Day of the week:

saturday

14: Beach:

Benidorm

13: Concert attended:

Time travellers

12: Thing to cook:

anything Mexican

11: Food:

stir fry

10: Restaurant:

my kitchen

9: Radio station:

smooth

8: Yankee candle scent:

human flesh

7: Perfume:

unicorn kisses

6: Flower:

red roses

5: Color:

gold

4: Talk show host:

ellen

3: Comedian:

Russel Howars

2: Dog breed:

cats

1: Did you answer all these truthfully?

fuck no