July 22, 2018

"There was to be a cross-burning in our neighborhood that night"....

I am a writer and rec'd my first award in 2nd grade at St. Stanislaus School in Stevens Point, WI. A golden plaque that stayed up for decades !! Anyway, I came across this piece and wanted to share the beauty of words and this fellow's story. Sadly, hate still exits today.

In the early sixties, my family lived in Alabama, the "Heart of Dixie' or as the state motto says. I was taught to take pride in the fact that our city did not fall to the Union Army during the Civil War: General Lee may have surrendered, but we never did.

One evening my father came home from work at the meat-packing plant and announced that there was to be a cross-burning in our neighborhood that night. A white man from out of town had brought his black wife to live here, and the Ku Klux Klan would not stand for such an affront.

After we'd finished our supper, Dad took down his shotgun and gave it a cleaning. Mom pitched a fit. She didn't think Dad should be involved with this mess:after all, he was a married man with a family. Dad left her crying on the porch as he climbed in his old Dodge pickup and drove off.

Dad came home he next morning after the sun had risen, tired and bleary-eyed. Mom clucked around him like a hen over a lost chick, but pride sparkled in her hazel eyes.

There had been no cross burning the night before, because my father had spent a sleepless night sitting on a porch and waiting, shotgun across his lap, beside a man he didn't know, to face a flock of cowards wearing sheets whom he knew far too well.

"Taking a Stand" by Daniel Harris Sept 2005

July 21, 2018

My Letter published yesterday: "WE ARE STUNNED BY THE POWER OF HIS DECEIT"

I have been writing 2 -4 letters a month for DEMS since 2009...this one was published yesterday...Please to enjoy. Jody.


WE ARE STUNNED BY THE POWER OF HIS DECEIT


"Dear America, You are waking up as Germany once did to the awareness that one third of your people would kill another third, while a third watches." Werner Twertzog. The perfect Russian storm came to life on Election Day. In our time no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now. The GOP clutching their flags and Bibles let them in the back door while we slept. July 13 Bashful Bob found the witches' coven in Moscow, and American witch indictments will soon follow.

We wake up every day and the moon hasn't tipped over. Imagine waking to find the moon flat on its face on the bathroom floor like Elvis Presley, poisoned by banana splits. Every day is worse. The old man who shampoos with Tang, has an ego that would make Napoleon blanch and a power lust that would make Stalin freak out. Trump's dishonesty has been central to his presidency. Serial deception is like a new perfume. At first you easily detect the scent. But over time with repeated applications you can hardly sense its presence, so you liberally apply more. You've desensitized. Watching a clip of one of Trump's hate rallies is akin to being locked in a phonebooth with a rabid raccoon.

The President of the US is a pathological and perverse liar. That changes the nature of your job as a citizen. This evil is being done in your name.We are stunned by the power of his deceit. That puts us in a state of fear. Fear paralyzes. Yet 27% don't see the man we see. A man who adores dictators and uses them as role models. A man visiting pain and misery upon the world. What kind of American looks at at Trump and doesn't see the monster we do? Putin seeks to destroy America and democracy worldwide and he's reduced Trump to his impotent toady. This is terrifying. Stop pretending it isn't. Stop being a "watcher".

Trump is unencumbered by conscience and morals. That is disarming to his foes. He breaks down peoples' ability to resist as he did with the NFL and his "doctors". He creates a reality and insists with extraordinary stamina his delusions are the truth. He calls it "bravado".

We've been tap dancing on the knife's edge for so long we've forgotten what it's like to genuinely rest.
Not all that walks in the shape of a man is human. The endgame is on. Trump goes down or we do. He will blow up the world to prove he matters. He is that disturbed. Protests and baby blimps are not election strategy and have no effect on him. Vote these Republican traitors out.

July 21, 2018

FROM RUSS FEINGOLD: Dems Have to Obstruct this Nomination.

FROM RUSS FEINGOLD:

Breaking: Dems Have to Obstruct this Nomination.

Even Trump’s biggest supporters in the Senate lost their cool on Monday when the president stepped onto the global stage and kowtowed to Vladimir Putin. Yet all we’ve really gotten so far is a few very concerned tweets and a bunch more pledges to confirm Brett Kavanaugh quickly.

This inaction stung even more than usual -- after all, these senators are the only ones who can stop what is arguably Trump’s biggest assault on democracy to date.

Unlike his good friend Putin, Donald Trump actually has to deal with democratic checks and balances like the Supreme Court. But if Kavanaugh gets confirmed to the Court after making explicit statements suggesting he’d defend Trump from Mueller’s investigation, this pillar of legitimacy crumbles. And our entire democracy may go with it.

July 21, 2018

"This week when the legislators were on the floor chanting USA USA really creeped me out."

Masha Gesson, Russian expert unmatched, on JOY's show. She said "This week when the legislators were on the floor chanting USA USA really creeped me out." Joy was taken aback....but think about it, I agree with Gesson. Our DEM reps and senators know who they are and where they are and what their job is.....to sink to the R's level, and Trump's level..having to profess loyalty to our country by yelling the name of our country in the Capitol is kind of lame. And they were unwittingly copying the nutjob Rs at Trump rallies. USA USA USA......

I like to think DEMS are smarter and more sophisticated than that.

July 20, 2018

Damn..Ari is GOOD..

Avenatti segment...Ari asked him if he would ever rep Cohen....Avenatti: not gonna go into that...Ari, you are a very good lawyer...blah..blah...Ari: I'm not interested in flattery, would you rep him? Avenatti says he just happened to be seated a few feet from Cohen the other day at an eatery and yes he would IF Cohen did they right thing and came clean...

Ari out maneuvered Avenatti..brilliant...he had no intention of revealing this...

July 20, 2018

Reason the FBI reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election ..

The reason the FBI reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election was because they were focused on investigating the Trump campaign's connections to Russia, according to the report from the Justice Department's inspector general. In late September 2016, FBI agents learned about a new batch of Clinton emails from the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner, who was under investigation for sexting a minor and was married at the time to Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The bureau was evidently overwhelmed with the urgency of the Trump-Russia investigation so that management lapses and communication breakdowns caused a month long delay in looking into the new Clinton emails. Nine days after announcing he was reopening the probe, James Comey said the FBI found nothing in the new emails to change the original July decision against bringing charges. (The Intercept)

July 19, 2018

Who is the Republican Sleepwalker on Ari??

Julius somebody...intro said he voted for T and is sad....then he went on to do some nuts monotone deal.....his voice even cracked like a teenybopper....Ari challenged him, the others ignored him and rightly so...

July 18, 2018

We we were the blueprint for Trump's America..How Conservatives Bet Big on Wisconsin and Won

For almost a decade we have had to listen to folks on blogs castigating us "What the hell is wrong with you guys in Wisconsin? You deserve what you get." No, No, we don't, anymore than all of us don't deserve Trump and 2018 Republicans. Please Read and learn.....

How Conservatives Bet Big on Wisconsin and Won Dan Kaufman


Hardcore conservatives adore infrastructure, and they’re phenomenally good at building it. This isn’t to say they’re necessarily committed to constructing roads and bridges and dams; it’s the infrastructure of their own movement — the one that has helped Republican politicians seize power in state legislatures over the past decade — that inspires their real dedication.

Their efforts have been chronicled in books like Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money” and Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains.” A conservative donor class, seeking to protect its agenda from the uncertainties of a democratic system, has erected a scaffolding of legislative groups and gerrymandered districts with the care and diligence of a structural engineer.

For progressives, Wisconsin has been a demoralizing case in point. In “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics,” the Brooklyn-based journalist and Wisconsin native Dan Kaufman shows how the state became a conservative test case. As the head of the right-wing, Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation told him, “Wisconsin is a laboratory for the rest of the country.”

The state, which Barack Obama carried over John McCain by 14 points in 2008, was supposed to be part of Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall” in the 2016 election. It instead went to Donald J. Trump, pushing him past the number of Electoral College votes he needed to win the presidency.

As Kaufman makes clear, though, the notion that Wisconsin in 2016 was some sort of Democratic stronghold showed just how complacent Clinton and the liberal establishment had become. Trump, sensing an opportunity, made an aggressive play for the state. Clinton, in stark contrast, sent surrogates instead of showing up herself. Kaufman describes her as not just out of touch but quite literally not there.

True, Wisconsin was long known for its progressive traditions; in the early 20th century, its state legislature established the nation’s first workers’ compensation program and a progressive state income tax, among other measures. The Scandinavian farmers who settled there in the 1800s had brought with them a communitarian mind-set born of necessity. The Swedish word folkhemmet, or “the people’s home,” became an affectionate nickname for the welfare state.

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The Wisconsin Idea, as it became known, was a pragmatic philosophy, wary of revolution but also deeply suspicious of laissez-faire capitalism. In an 1873 commencement speech, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court warned of the “new and dark power” emerging in the Gilded Age: “Which shall rule — wealth or man; which shall lead — money or intellect; who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?”

Whenever you encounter soaring words like these in a book with the word “fall” in the title, brace yourself for a crash landing. Kaufman invites us to contrast a century of progressivism with what happened after 1976, when the United States Supreme Court outlawed limits on campaign spending.


This was also around the time that a 10-year-old Scott Walker moved with his family to Delavan, Wis., from Iowa. A decade later, as a mediocre student at Marquette University, Walker was candid about his grand political ambitions, telling one of his classmates, “God has told me I’m chosen to cut taxes and stop killing babies.”

Walker appears in Mayer’s “Dark Money” as a “college dropout with no exceptional charisma or charm” who coasted to victory in Wisconsin’s 2010 gubernatorial election, after wealthy conservative backers identified him as a Tea Party politician with a simpatico ideology. As Kaufman details, Walker has given his donors a spectacular return on their investment, gutting collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions (exempting firefighters and police officers, who had supported his campaign) and slashing taxes by $8 billion.

Walker even paid lip service to his state’s past by calling one of his early pieces of legislation — the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, also know as Act 10 — “progressive.” But the tax cuts he enacted were so extreme that they inflated the state’s deficit to $2 billion. Kaufman describes 2011 and 2012 as a pivotal moment in Wisconsin’s political transformation, when widespread protests culminated in a recall election against Walker — which the governor survived.

Conservatives also recognized the powerful symbolism of making the industrial Midwest hostile to organized labor, and planned accordingly. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin,” the billionaire industrialist David Koch told a reporter in early 2012. “We’re going to spend more.” Meanwhile, President Obama, Kaufman writes, “declined to make even a brief stop in Wisconsin to campaign for Walker’s opponent, Tom Barrett, despite Barrett’s plea for help.”

You can sense Kaufman’s mounting outrage, even if he’s quiet about it. His prose is somber and subdued. The most incensed he gets is in an earnest paragraph about Hillary Clinton and her “negligence of Wisconsin,” in which any bile could pass as indigestion.

Maybe such understatement testifies to the author’s bona fides as a native son. During the 2011 demonstrations, he wrote a dispatch for The New Yorker that mentioned a quintessentially Wisconsinite protest sign: “Let’s Be Reasonable. Hyperbole Hurts Everyone’s Cause.”

If anything, Kaufman argues, Wisconsin’s historical penchant for balance and moderation shows how extreme the conservative movement has become. (He only mentions Sen. Joseph McCarthy once, in passing; if Kaufman viewed him as an extraordinary aberration, he could have spent at least a paragraph or two making his case.) In addition to having been hospitable to labor, Wisconsin was also home to a real tradition of environmental stewardship, regardless of party affiliation. That changed too, as jobs were lost to free trade and extractive industries like mining promised to replace them. Native American elders have been pleading with Walker to renounce short-term thinking and commit to acting like the “true conservatives” who value ecological conservation, generally to no avail.

Kaufman finds some hope in the insurgent Democratic candidacy of Randy Bryce, a former ironworker and union activist, who ran to unseat Republican Speaker Paul Ryan from Wisconsin’s First Congressional District. (Ryan has since surprised voters by announcing he would retire.) But Kaufman fears that some of Wisconsin’s progressive traditions have already been crushed beyond repair.

Clean air, clean water, good schools: The public infrastructure that was considered common sense for Wisconsinites has been attacked by the right as if it were a red menace — or, in today’s vernacular, the rarefied purview of urban elites. Kaufman believes that Wisconsin’s extreme makeover portends something scary for the rest of us. “If conservatives cannot tolerate a state that offers what Wisconsin once did,” he writes, “what kind of future is there for the American citizen?”

July 17, 2018

MSNBC just said "Did you notice he only corrected ONE WORD....all the crap he spewed??"

Brilliant point...all the crap he spewed and only ONE WORD was wrong....

July 17, 2018

Did you spot it..as soon as he told the BIG lie he started sniffing...a tell..

He said he wants to correct the verb...It probably WAS, not WASN'T Russia...we got bad ears....for Christ's sake..maybe Putin will poison his burger tonite....