Courting Disbelief (God Men in Charge Now? As All Hope Is Lost) Little Spiritual Comfort (2016: Irony Murdered) Real Legal Aid Is For 1% (Bye-Bye DNC!!!)

BREAKING: New Proof The Election Was Rigged Against Democrats!

I just talked with two election experts – Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller – both incredibly accomplished in their fields. They agreed that this election was indeed rigged, and even though it has been Donald Trump spouting off about election rigging, perhaps he didn’t realize that the machinery was in place to rig it in HIS FAVOR. Greg Palast estimates that 1.1 MILLION people, mainly minorities, were knocked off the voting rolls in swing states using a system called “Cross Check.” That system accuses people of being “double voters” even though there is absolutely no proof. Cross Check is used in 30 Republican-led states. On top of that, Palast discovered that ballot protection software on the new Ohio voting machines was TURNED OFF. Election law expert Bob Fitrakis actually took Ohio to court last week to make sure the ballot protection software be turned ON. However, the judge sided with the state and said to leave it OFF on election day!

Professor Mark Crispin Miller agrees with Palast, saying that this election was stolen from the Democrats in a similar fashion to 2000 and 2004. And this is not coming from a fan of Hillary Clinton. Miller pointed out that Hillary Clinton is a neo-liberal who was intent on continuing to gut the social safety net and allowing the big banks to run wild. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a fair election. Furthermore, this is not just about the Presidency. This election theft impacts congressional and gubernatorial races as well.

I strongly believe that if Hillary Clinton – and the corporate Democrats in general – had ACTUALLY stood for something, then people would’ve had a reason to stand with them. This is why Bernie Sanders would’ve won this election easily. (He would’ve beat the margin that was stolen.) People believed what Bernie Sanders said, and that’s why he attracted an enthusiastic following. Even most Hillary voters didn’t take her at her word. Her actions proved that she supports trade deals, supports war, supports weapons contractors, supports oil and gas, and supports the big banks. If the left ever wants to win again, they need to start TRULY standing for something, rather than just feeding people lies while enriching themselves.

Donald Trump Is Moving to the White House, and Liberals Put Him There

Thomas Frank

Hillary Clinton was exactly the wrong candidate:  a technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine

A month ago I tried to write a column proposing mean nicknames for president-elect Donald Trump, on the basis that it would be funny to turn the tables on him for the cruel diminutives he applied to others.

I couldn’t pull it off. There is a darkness about Trump that negates that sort of humor: a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound that no insult could plumb its depths.

He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party. His convention was a fiasco. He had no ground game to speak of. The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely short. He needlessly offended countless groups of people: women, Hispanics, Muslims, disabled people, mothers of crying babies, the Bush family, and George Will-style conservatives, among others. He even lost Glenn Beck, for pete’s sake.

And now he is going to be president of the United States. The woman we were constantly assured was the best-qualified candidate of all time has lost to the least qualified candidate of all time. Everyone who was anyone rallied around her, and it didn’t make any difference. The man too incompetent to insult is now going to sit in the Oval Office, whence he will hand down his beauty-contest verdicts on the grandees and sages of the old order.

Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After all, there was a reason that tens of millions of good people voted for him yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high regard for him. He has pledged to “drain the swamp” of DC corruption, and maybe he will sincerely tackle that task. He has promised to renegotiate Nafta, and maybe that, too, will finally come to pass. Maybe he’ll win so much for us (as he once predicted in a campaign speech) that we’ll get sick of winning.

But let’s not deceive ourselves. We aren’t going to win anything. What happened on Tuesday is a disaster, both for liberalism and for the world. As President Trump goes about settling scores with his former rivals, picking fights with other countries, and unleashing his special deportation police on this group and that, we will all soon have cause to regret his ascension to the presidential throne. 

Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

1. Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.

2. Her scandals weren’t real. 

3. The economy was doing well / America was already great. 

4. Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump. 

5. And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.

Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

Basta!

The Blog Fodder reminds us about the eternal shoulder setter.

And I had thought it was Tim Kaine. (For the "good guys," of course.)

Always the god botherers in charge? (Under wraps.)

The Religious Right hide their man behind Trump as VP.  Mike Pence will be Trump's HW and Cheney.  In fact Trump has already said he will leave the details of being POTUS to Pence.  This is a Dominionist's wet dream.  Republican's control the presidency, the house, the senate and the supreme court and the Religious Right is positioned to control them.

Every regressive, oppressive law the Religious Right ever dreamed of will now be passed and every inconvenient SCOTUS decision overturned.  Republican Jesus will have his theocracy. Voter suppression will reach depths not seen since Jim Crow. Republican control of the states will only increase and in 2020 and going forward Republicans will win every federal election because they control the voting.

And Miss R-Kelly lost.

Finally.

Seventeen Ballot Initiatives to Watch if You Care About Inequality

Amid Clinton Controversy, FBI Documents Show Why Americans Should Worry About Intelligence Gathering

Republican Kelly Ayotte Lost Millions of Dollars by Defying Koch Brothers on Climate Change

Climate Change Is Intergenerational Theft. That's Why My Son Is Part of This Story

Driftglass brings us spiritual comfort.

Of a sort.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But we must move forward.

Kids?

Irony was murdered this year.

Violently.

Without a backward look:

Legal Aid Is for the 1% According to Peter Thiel

Our girl called it.

But no one was listening then.

“The DNC Is Gone:”  Susan Sarandon Defends Vote for Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

“The DNC is gone and we need a progressive party,” Sarandon said in defense of her support for Jill Stein.

Sarandon slammed DNC corruption:  “In bed with every superdelegate is a lobbyist.”