Beautifully expressed, thank you!
I completed his look in a previous threadâŚdidnât take much work! 
Continuing the discussion from Trump says he'll win the Latino vote:
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Meanwhile, despite winning the Time poll for âPerson of the Yearâ, Bernie Sanders was cut from the list and replaced with Trump by Time editors. I wonder why.
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GOP and Dem judicial appointments arenât created equally. One more round of GOP judicial appointments to SCOTUS, and we could lose Roe v. Wade.
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And then they picked⌠Merkel? I find Time magazine to be increasingly irrelevantâŚ
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dunno, Destroyer of South Europe should count for something
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Excellent new lyrics!
This would be a great way to fight T-Rump: publicizing the parodies of an earworm everyone in this country knows. Can you imagine clusters of protesters starting to hum as soon as he comes in view? Pretty soon, everyone will reflexively start humming to themselves whenever they see him. That would be the most glorious burn ever.
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Perhaps. That would be awful. However, I doubt that RvW could or would be reversed. GOP promises to do so (like Bush Jrâs) are hot air, just like the Demsâ promises to actually offer a meaningful alternative to the GOP. A lot of Trumpâs horrifying promises are likewise undeliverable, as many people have pointed out.
Even so, given all of the awful things that Democrats are bound to do, the RvW threat, miniscule and improbable as it is, canât be reason enough to keep putting them in office and legitimizing the electoral circus; Democratic supporters can never provide satisfactory reasons for their depressing litany of wrongdoings because there is none. No stick-and-carrot routine should ever lead someone to continue putting warmongering butchers in power. There is a moral obligation to take serious and uncompromising action to stop our wars, even putting aside all other issues, and right now thatâs not happening, not even from progressive golden child Sanders, who supports the Afghanistan invasion (with some mild provisos), which resulted in several million war-related civilian deaths.
Put more simply, the Dems privilege gender struggles over anti-imperialist, anti-racist ones, even though the rhetoric is almost always anti-racist (but seldom anti-imperialist). Racism isnât just words, itâs also prison walls and bombs. What determines this hierarchy of priorities? Could it be latent racism and an unwavering commitment to US imperialism?
The GOP is marginally worse on many domestic issues, but for the hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated in our prison-industrial complex, the thousands deported, and the millions killed abroad while the US is helmed by both Democrats and Republicans, which party is in power makes no difference to them.
However, to be fair, I think that a lot of people vote Dem because it is really the only thing that can be done inside the system (such as it is), with the exception of going third party in earnest, which as we all know hasnât worked for a very long time and is a tall order, but itâs still not as difficult as more drastic alternatives (which will have to be taken sooner or later for serious and sweeping changes to occur). This cynical, vote-for-Dems-or-else dynamic doesnât give us a choice, but an ultimatum. This is not a functioning republic.
Even if we assume that Democrats are earnest, their repeat failure to change the status quo of these kinds of issues, and their failure in the face of an ascendant GOP dominance in many areas of government across the country, tells us that voting for them isnât going to work. They are the party of failure. As I wrote in my previous comment, even when they have a sitting President and majorities in both the Senate and the House, they still donât follow through. This has a lot to do with why discontented voters choose the GOP.
I think that the other factor at work behind supporting Democrats against the evidence is of course nationalism. Itâs understandably hard for a lot of people to admit that a country and a government built on slavery and genocide, and which thrive on racism and genocide even today, are not worth keeping around.
Debates about police reform follow a similar trajectory. While the police certainly perform some vital public safety functions, they are also the stateâs primary domestic repressive apparatus, and are always there on the front lines to enforce institutional racism and attack social movements. Reformists keep pointing to their useful functions and either ignore or want to change their repressive ones. But there is always a âthird termâ in such either/or binariesârejecting the system and pushing for a totally different set of structures to perform those useful functions without the baggage of the repressive ones.
That this is not a realistic goal right now can be attributed explicitly to continued Democratic Party support; discontented voters and politicians have not made a break and pursued alternatives for a more longterm vision merely because they are focused on the next election in the short term, or because (as I think is often the case) they arenât really interested in alrernatives. Threats like the reversal of RvW, and even Trump, have to be weighed in this light.
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From Wordnik, âexasperatedâ:
adj. greatly annoyed; made furious adj. made worse or more intense
Brother Jebby 
's exasperation is about as âmade furiousâ as cheese on toast.
The point at which conservatives will ignore twenty-plus years of âHRC is the Anti-Christâ (and shouted in Dave Chappellâs best crazy-white-racist voice) and vote for her? Seems about as likely asâŚJebby, :heavy_exclamation_mark:, showing anything other thanâŚdare I say, Low Energy Bush.
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A moniker aptly hung on that jackass by current Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter:
I should explain that our relationship is one of gentle thrust and parry. âI just heard you are trying to put yet another âhitâ on me through writer William Cohan,â he said in the recent letter. âYouâve been trying since the terrible GQ cover story you wrote in May of 1984. After that, with your failed (which I predicted) SPY Magazine (I actually have very long fingers) and then Vanity Fair, especially the stupid blogger who works for you. At least you donât give up!â I must say I was flattered not only that he remembered the year and month of the GQ story in question but that he had such a firm grasp of the broad outlines of my professional activities over the past quarter-century. His rebuttal to the schoolyard label âshort-fingered vulgarianâ we once hung on him at Spy was positively adorable. He even circled his hand on the cover of his autobiographyâin bright-gold ink, no lessâwhich he enclosed as further proof of the error of our ways.
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Very optimistic.
If Trump runs in the general (whether as an independent or a Republican), then it is going to be an exceptionally ugly campaign, even by American standards.
I would be absolutely astonished if we didnât see a further escalation of violence from Trumpâs followers, and I would expect that violence to continue past the election if Trump loses (as he almost certainly will).
Trump may not be Hitler, but heâs well on the way to Mosley, and his Blackshirts are much better armed than the British version were.
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Iâm not able to agree because even one more GOP SCOTUS appointment could supply the fifth or sixth vote to overrule Roe â and other horrors.
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I personally prefer this article, where Carter mentions that Trump has been consistently sending him mail about this for the past 25 years:
Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a âshort-fingered vulgarianâ in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. ***To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of himâgenerally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers.*** I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby. The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: âSee, not so short!â I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, âActually, quite short.â Which I can only assume gave him fits.
(Emphasis mine.)
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Iâm having difficulty getting past him treating a zip-up hoodie like a pullover.
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Remember, Donald Trump leading the GOP field means he's supported by a whopping 35% of 28% of America.
â John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) December 10, 2015
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That is, according to my exceedingly bad math, just shy of 30 million people.
Which is way, way, WAY too many.
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Remember, Donald Trump might be leading in polls, but that only means heâs leading amongst people with land-line phones who are comfortable telling anonymous strangers that they like Trump.
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The interesting thing about this topic is that Trump has to make up his mind by April, or else he wonât get the ballot access he needs. This schedule works for somebody like John Anderson, who, in the spring of 1980, looked strong nationally but was getting tripped up in the early primaries.
But the motivation for an independent run in Trumpâs case is different. He fears that the GOP establishment will shut him out. If theyâre going to do it, it will happen at the convention, which is in July. He wonât be able to mount an independent run at that point.
Iâm starting to think that this is how it will go down. It wonât matter if he has a plurality of delegates in Cleveland, since convention rules are adopted by majority vote, and his opponentsâ delegates will be united against him.
Oh, and if he does go for an independent run, things have the potential to get even more interesting:
It is always possible that a thirdâparty candidate, by taking a state or two, may prevent either of the major party candidates from winning an electoral college majority, but this has not happened in the last 170 years. In such an event, the Constitution specifies that the election is thrown into the House of Representatives. It is quite likely, however, that in the weeks between the election and the gathering of the electoral college, the thirdâparty candidate would entertain âbidsâ for his electors from one of the leadersâin return for policy or personnel concessions.
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Wait, Trump gets called a âshort-fingered vulgarianâ and the part that offends him is the implication he has short fingers? Shouldnât he be more worried about the âvulgarianâ part?
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A Vulgarian? Isnât that somewhere in Eastern Europe, where he likes to get his wives from?
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