Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
Thursday, 17 December 2015 11:27
Moore writes: "Donald, you and your supporters no longer look like what America actually is today. We are not a country of angry white guys."
Michael Moore in front of Trump Tower in New York City. (photo: Michael Moore's Facebook page)
Dear Donald Trump
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
17 December 15
oday I went & stood in front of Trump Tower & held a sign until the police came. Then I went home & wrote Donald a letter. Here it is:
Dear Donald Trump:
You may remember (you do, after all, have a "perfect memory!"), that we met back in November of 1998 in the green room of a talk show where we were both scheduled to appear one afternoon. But just before going on, I was pulled aside by a producer from the show who said that you were "nervous" about being on the set with me. She said you didn't want to be "ripped apart" and you wanted to be reassured I wouldn't "go after you."
"Does he think I'm going to tackle him and put him in a choke hold?" I asked, bewildered.
"No," the producer replied, "he just seems all jittery about you."
"Huh. I've never met the guy. There's no reason for him to be scared," I said. "I really don't know much about him other than he seems to like his name on stuff. I'll talk to him if you want me to."
And so, as you may remember, I did. I went up and introduced myself to you. "The producer says you're worried I might say or do something to you during the show. Hey, no offense, but I barely know who you are. I'm from Michigan. Please don't worry -- we're gonna get along just fine!"
You seemed relieved, then leaned in and said to me, "I just didn't want any trouble out there and I just wanted to make sure that, you know, you and I got along. That you weren't going to pick on me for something ridiculous."
"Pick on" you? I thought, where are we, in 3rd grade? I was struck by how you, a self-described tough guy from Queens, seemed like such a fraidey-cat.
You and I went on to do the show. Nothing untoward happened between us. I didn't pull on your hair, didn't put gum on your seat. "What a wuss," was all I remember thinking as I left the set.
And now, here we are in 2015 and, like many other angry white guys, you are frightened by a bogeyman who is out to get you. That bogeyman, in your mind, are all Muslims. Not just the ones who have killed, but ALL MUSLIMS.
Fortunately, Donald, you and your supporters no longer look like what America actually is today. We are not a country of angry white guys. Here's a statistic that is going to make your hair spin: Eighty-one percent of the electorate who will pick the president next year are either female, people of color, or young people between the ages of 18 and 35. In other words, not you. And not the people who want you leading their country.
So, in desperation and insanity, you call for a ban on all Muslims entering this country. I was raised to believe that we are all each other's brother and sister, regardless of race, creed or color. That means if you want to ban Muslims, you are first going to have to ban me. And everyone else.
We are all Muslim.
Just as we are all Mexican, we are all Catholic and Jewish and white and black and every shade in between. We are all children of God (or nature or whatever you believe in), part of the human family, and nothing you say or do can change that fact one iota. If you don't like living by these American rules, then you need to go to the time-out room in any one of your Towers, sit there, and think about what you've said.
And then leave the rest of us alone so we can elect a real president who is both compassionate and strong -- at least strong enough not to be all whiny and scared of some guy in a ballcap from Michigan sitting next to him on a talk show couch. You're not so tough, Donny, and I'm glad I got to see the real you up close and personal all those years ago.
We are all Muslim. Deal with it.
All my best,
Michael Moore
P.S. I'm asking everyone who reads this letter to go here (http://michaelmoore.com/weareallmuslim), and sign the following statement: "WE ARE ALL MUSLIM" -- and then post a photo of yourself holding a homemade sign saying "WE ARE ALL MUSLIM" on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram using the hashtag ?#?WeAreAllMuslim?. I will post all the photos on my site and send them to you, Mr. Trump. Feel free to join us.
Reich writes: "The great American middle class has become an anxious class - and it's in revolt."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
The Revolt of the Anxious Class
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
17 December 15
he great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt.
Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety.
Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey.
The odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees.
Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time.
Many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it.
Yet if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.
The stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping.
According to research by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United States have been dying earlier.
They’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide.
The odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and fragility.
The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.
Yet government can’t be counted on to protect them.
Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance.
Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally.
Government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.
They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.
When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes.
Last year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made over the course of over twenty years, and who influenced those decisions.
Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.
They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos.
Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America.
A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.
It was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border. You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing abroad.
Nor should you even try.
Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.
Still, they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich. He tells it like it is.
He makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his adversaries weak.
So what if he’s crude and rude? Maybe that’s what it takes to protect average people in this cruelly precarious world.
For years I’ve heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I’ve listened to their growing anger – in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America.
I’ve heard their complaints and cynicism, their conspiracy theories and their outrage.
Most are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong sense of fairness.
But their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up.
Now someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have bullied them economically, politically, and even violently.
The attraction is understandable, even though misguided.
If not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not this election cycle, it will be the next one.
Excerpt: "If one of the goals of ISIS is to scare the American people, the GOP did them a service on Tuesday night - ratcheting up the fearful rhetoric, and combining it with ideas that were at times ignorant or illegal."
GOP debate. (photo: unknown)
A GOP Debate ISIS Would Love
By Tim Mak and Jackie Kucinich, The Daily Beast
16 December 15
From carpet bombings that would kill scores of civilians to Muslim blockades to Internet bans, the Republican debate sent a message to American viewers: Be afraid.
f one of the goals of ISIS is to scare the American people, the GOP did them a service on Tuesday night—ratcheting up the fearful rhetoric, and combining it with ideas that were at times ignorant or illegal.
From carpet bombings that would kill scores of civilians to Muslim blockades to Internet bans, the Republican debate sent a message to American viewers: Be afraid.
It plays right into ISIS’s hands: As a terrorist organization that is outmatched in brute strength by the United States, one of its most potent tools is psychological. It can use fear to provoke an overreaction. And boy, did the Republicans overreact.
Forget that an American is more likely to be fatally crushed by furniture than killed in a terrorist attack. Cue instead Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, talking about nuclear weapons: “The power, the devastation, is very important to me,” Trump said.
Absent is the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan, a president many of the GOP candidates have quoted and idolized. Gone is the they’ll-hear-from-us resolve that George W. Bush showed after the 9/11 attacks. Instead, we heard from Carly Fiorina, saying, “Like all of you, I’m angry.”
Chris Christie added, “America has been betrayed.”
This wasn’t unexpected. Given the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, the country and—particularly the Republican electorate—are on high alert.
But it wasn’t only dark rhetoric: The Republican debate featured proposals that can only be considered dangerous or stupid. Like he’s doing in the polls, Trump led the field on this account, proposing that the United States try to ban ISIS from using the Internet.
“We should be using our brilliant people, our most brilliant minds to figure a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet,” the businessman said.
Trump didn’t suggest any actual way to accomplish this, and given that the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS is backed by an ideology that can be taken up by individuals all throughout the world—individuals who cannot be easily identified or constrained to a particular region—the proposal is a non-starter.
The businessman was not only proposing nonsensical ideas, but also ones that violate American commitment regarding humane treatment of civilians. Trump again supported violence against the families of terrorists, which goes against the well-established principles of international law.
“I would be very, very firm with families,” Trump said. “Frankly, that will make people think because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”
He was called out by Rand Paul, who pointed out that his policies would throw out years of precedent—not to mention involve withdrawing from a key international treaty.
But Trump was not alone in a willingness to accept the deaths of innocent civilians and potentially commit war crimes. When asked by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt whether he would be “OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilians,” Ben Carson responded: “You got it. You got it.”
And Sen. Ted Cruz has said he wants to “carpet-bomb” ISIS, which would essentially require blanketing urban, ISIS-held areas like Raqqa with munitions. Since ISIS hides among civilian populations, such actions would almost certainly kill scores of non-combatants, and could be considered a war crime if it could be shown that the U.S. was intentionally attacking civilians. The very nature of carpet-bombing is that it is imprecise, destroying entire areas without discrimination.
Other Republicans were merely wrong. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina said that she would “bring back the warrior class,” listing off retired generals like David Petraeus that she would consult as president. “Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear,” she said.
Eh, not quite. Petraeus was forced to retire as director of the CIA for allegedly giving classified documents to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair.
It was a night full of spats, but two face-offs dominated the debate: Jeb Bush’s attacks on Donald Trump, and rising contenders Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio going head-to-head over national security and immigration.
Senators Cruz and Rubio, who have both been rising in the polls, argued substantively on the core issues of the debate: How big the military budget should be, how much the NSA should be allowed to do, and what to do with the undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.
“Three times he voted against the Defense Authorization Act, which is a bill that funds the troops,” Rubio said, of Cruz. “He has also supported, by the way, a budget that is called the containment budget. And it is a budget that would radically reduce the amount of money we spend on our military. You can’t carpet bomb ISIS if you don’t have planes and bombs to attack them with.”
“I voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, because when I campaigned in Texas I told voters in Texas that I would oppose the federal government having the authority to detain U.S. citizens permanently with no due process,” Cruz responded. “Let’s be absolutely clear. ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism will face no more determined foe than I will be.”
Bush showed life, executing his strongest debate performance, in which he condemned Trump as a “chaos candidate” who would become a “chaos president” (a putdown that quickly morphed into a Jeb! fundraising site). He seemed unfazed by Trump’s rebuttal—that Bush was doing poorly in the polls. In fact, Bush retorted, “Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency. That’s not going to happen.”
Christie also seemed to be back to his pre-Bridgegate self and was more than ready to jump into the fray, at one point calling President Obama a “feckless weakling.”
But at least one much-hyped “cage match” didn’t happen.
Cruz and Trump basically steered clear of each other, save a few verbal—almost real—hugs. At one point, as CNN went to a commercial break, the two could be seen shaking hands.
CNN’s Dana Bash baited Trump and Cruz to fight, asking about comments Cruz made during a closed-door fundraiser about Trump’s temperament. Upon hearing the comments last weekend, Trump responded by calling Cruz a “maniac.”
But by Tuesday, apparently, all was forgiven.
“He has a wonderful temperament, he’s just fine,” Trump said, noting that he and Cruz had a chance to talk over the past few days. “Don’t worry about it.”
Lawmakers Have Snuck CISA Into a Bill That Is Guaranteed to Become a Law
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32718"><span class="small">Jason Koebler, VICE</span></a>
Wednesday, 16 December 2015 15:38
Koebler writes: "To anyone who has protested the sweeping, vague, and privacy-killing iterations of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act or the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act over the last several years, sorry, lawmakers have heard you, and they have ignored you."
Rep. Paul Ryan. (photo: AP)
Lawmakers Have Snuck CISA Into a Bill That Is Guaranteed to Become a Law
That sounds bleak, but lawmakers have stripped the very bad CISA bill of almost all of its privacy protections and have inserted the full text of it into a bill that is essentially guaranteed to be passed and will certainly not be vetoed by President Obama.
CISA allows private companies to pass your personal information and online goings-on to the federal government and local law enforcement if it suspects a "cybersecurity threat," a term so broadly defined that it can apply to "anomalous patterns of communication" and can be used to gather information about just about any crime, cyber or not.
At 2 AM Wednesday morning, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan unveiled a 2000-page budget bill that will fund the federal government well into next year. The omnibus spending bill, as it's usually referred to, is the result of countless hours of backroom dealings and negotiations between Republicans and Democrats.
Without the budget bill (or a short-term emergency measure), the government shuts down, as it did in 2013 for 16 days when lawmakers couldn’t reach a budget deal. It contains dozens of measures that make the country run, and once it's released and agreed to, it's basically a guarantee to pass. Voting against it or vetoing it is politically costly, which is kind of the point: Republicans get some things they want, Democrats get some things they want, no one is totally happy but they live with it anyway. This is how countless pieces of bad legislation get passed in America—as riders on extremely important pieces of legislation that are politically difficult to vote against.
"In a closed-door meeting with fellow Republicans, Ryan touted a pause in Obamacare's 'Cadillac tax,' the lifting of a longstanding oil-export ban and preservation of several other policy preferences in the year-end deal, which include $1.149 trillion in spending and several hundred billion in tax breaks. After the deal was announced, many members of both parties said Democrats won this round on federal spending. They agreed to lift the prohibition on exporting US oil, but turned back other so-called GOP policy riders, including efforts to tighten restrictions on Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The GOP also did not mount a serious effort to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, although many hardline conservatives had demanded such a move."
You see how it is. This is some House of Cards-type shit, and anyone who values their privacy is screwed, because, let's face it—CISA is small potatoes politically speaking compared to the other stuff in here. Every major political media outlet is already talking about how the deal avoids a government shutdown and is talking as though it has already been passed. And that’s because, for all intents and purposes, the agreement on the text of the bill itself was the politically difficult hurdle to clear—the actual passage of it is a foregone conclusion.
Perhaps because lawmakers knew the bill would not be vetoed or pushed back against, many of the already weak privacy protections remaining in the Senate version of CISA have been stripped.
The version of CISA in the budget bill allows "cybersecurity threat" information to be shared directly with the NSA and the department of defense, specifically removes a provision that banned the government from using the information for "surveillance" activities, and allows the government to use the information it gleans to prosecute any type of criminal activity, not just "cyber" crimes.
Finally, the new version does not require personal information unrelated to "cyber threats" to be scrubbed before it's shared with government agencies.
At this point, there is very little anyone can do about it. The budget bill is going to pass—political prognosticators are saying it'll happen by Friday at the latest. And then it's off to President Obama's desk. Obama has been asking for cybersecurity reform since the Sony hack last year—he probably wasn't going to veto a standalone version of CISA; there's roughly a 0 percent chance he's going to shut down the federal government because of a minor little thing like privacy.
The Worst Year for Abortion Rights Since Roe v. Wade
Wednesday, 16 December 2015 15:25
Goldberg writes: "As the Republican Party has grown more extreme, it has expanded its reach in the states. 2015 was a milestone year for Republican control of state legislatures, with the party dominating both houses in 30 states, the highest number since at least 1978."
Rally in support of Planned Parenthood. (photo: AP)
The Worst Year for Abortion Rights Since Roe v. Wade
By Michelle Goldberg, Slate
16 December 15
It’s been a terrible year for abortion rights—but there is opportunity to be found amid the setbacks.
n this series, Double X writers look back on 2015’s flashpoint debates around gender and feminism as they played out in the spheres of reproductive rights, work-life balance, pop music, affirmative consent on campus, and more. Read all the entries here.
The past year might have been the worst for abortion rights in America since Roe v. Wade was decided 42 years ago. This was the year that David Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress infiltrated Planned Parenthood and turned shop talk about tissue donation into a propaganda coup, leading to five separate congressional investigations. Support for abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest became the normative position among Republican presidential candidates. Purvi Patel, who tried to end her pregnancy by taking pills she ordered online, became the first American woman to be convicted of feticide (as well as child neglect) after an attempted self-abortion; she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. We learned that at least 100,000 women in Texas have tried to self-induce abortion. The total number of anti-abortion murders in America increased from eight to 11. And the Supreme Court accepted a case that could eviscerateRoe v. Wade.
“We are experiencing the culmination of a decades-long strategy by anti-choice extremists,” says Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The far-right takeover of the GOP, a project that’s been underway for more than 40 years, is complete, meaning that a candidate like Marco Rubio can support forced childbirth for rape victims and still be seen as the mainstream alternative to his party’s conservative zealots. “Certainly in this presidential election, the rhetoric around women, around doctors who provide abortions, is worse than anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream politics,” says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.
As the Republican Party has grown more extreme, it has expanded its reach in the states. 2015 was a milestone year for Republican control of state legislatures, with the party dominating both houses in 30 states, the highest number since at least 1978. Republicans used their electoral strength to pass 57 new state-level anti-abortion laws. Overall, there were more state anti-abortion laws passed in 2011 and 2013 than this year, but that’s partly because the most conservative states have already enacted so much of the anti-abortion movement’s wish list. “To some extent, they’re running out of things to do,” says Richards.
Several of the worst recent laws have now had time to come into effect. “Two or three years ago, there was this theoretical or political war on women,” says Richards. “Today it’s very real.” In Texas, HB 2, the omnibus anti-abortion act that the Supreme Court will evaluate next year, has already resulted in the shutdown of more than half of the state’s clinics,due to the law’s cumbersome, arbitrary building and staffing requirements. If HB 2 is allowed to stand, another 10 of the state’s 19 existing clinics will likely close. As other states copy the law, Roe will become increasingly meaningless. “If what is passed in Texas is not considered an undue burden on women, basically anything goes,” says Richards. “If abortion is a constitutional right but you can’t access it unless you live in the right state, it’s not really a right.”
“You can’t have forty years of describing what women do as killing without it having an impact on how the women who have abortions are treated,” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “What we’re witnessing is the culmination of a kind of group defamation.” Women who have abortions “are characterized as people who kill and dismember unborn children. What we do to people who we view as criminals is we punish them.”
This is also true of organizations that are viewed as criminal. “With the increase in political hysteria and rhetoric against abortion providers and women who seek abortions, we have seen a huge uptick in harassment at our health centers,” Richards says. In the wake of the Center for Medical Progress videos, threats against Planned Parenthood have increased by a factor of nine, according to Richards. A Planned Parenthood in Pullman, Washington, that was set on fire in September is still closed. A New Hampshire clinic that was attacked in October by someone wielding a hatchet only reopened last week. And, of course, Robert Lewis Dear, the self-described “warrior for the babies,” killed three people during a rampage at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.
Having an abortion in Texas has already become much more difficult. “We’re seeing clients come to us who are having to drive hundreds of miles and stay overnight,” says Richards about her home state. “There’s been an elimination of access in cities that have had abortion providers for many years.”
There is some evidence that, as a result, more women are attempting self-abortion. A recent study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project estimated that at least 100,000 women in the state have at some point tried to self-induce. The study’s authors write:
Since abortion became legal nationwide in 1973, women attempting to end a pregnancy on their own outside of a clinical setting … has generally been thought to be very rare. But there are two recent changes that may be leading the incidence of self-induction to increase. The first is the advent of onerous legislation imposing restrictions on legal abortion access. The second is the increasing preference for medication abortion, as well as the possibility of women accessing abortion-causing drugs on their own.
As more women turn to self-abortion, some will run into a trap that the anti-abortion movement has set: feticide laws. These laws are framed as a means to protect pregnant women: Indiana, where Purvi Patel was convicted after she tried to induce her own late-term abortion, made feticide a Class B felony in 2009 after the shooting of a bank teller, Katherine Shuffield, who lost the twins she was carrying. Pro-choice forces have long warned that feticide laws, which are on the books in 38 states, would be turned against pregnant women. As legal abortion becomes harder to access, Patel’s case could become a terrifying precedent. Indeed, just last week, Tennessee’s Anna Yocca was arrested for attempted first-degree murder after trying to perform her own abortion at 24 weeks with a coat hanger. (As the Washington Postreported, Tennessee broadened its homicide statutes to include fetuses and embryos in 2012.)
If there’s comfort for abortion rights supporters in the current moment, it mostly lies in the hope that abortion opponents have overstepped. “The idea that Ted Cruz could accept an endorsement from Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, who has openly advocated for state-sanctioned execution of abortion providers, and feel like there’s going to be no political cost to pay for that, is extraordinarily sobering, and it should be a wakeup call to everyone in this country,” says Hogue. “That said, I really, really think that therein lies an opportunity.”
It’s likely that the Republican nominee for president will support a total abortion ban; as we move into the general election campaign, the challenge to Texas’s abortion law, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, will come before the Supreme Court. With the right to abortion more imperiled than ever, pro-choice activists believe we’ll see pushback from the majority of Americans who don’t want to see abortion criminalized.
Both Richards and Hogue are encouraged by the growing frankness about abortion in popular culture, as people work to de-stigmatize a procedure that as many as 1 in 3 women will undergo in her lifetime. Glossy women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan have stepped up their coverage of reproductive rights. Celebrities have become more vocal: Jemima Kirke spoke publicly about having an abortion without anesthesia, which at the time she couldn’t afford, and Mark Ruffalo described learning about his mother’s illegal abortion. “I can’t stand aside with two beautiful young girls of my own and accept that we’re going to return to those days,” he said. Jessica Jones, Netflix’s critically acclaimed superhero noir, featured a subplot about a woman desperate for an abortion after being raped. Olivia Pope, the heroine of the Shonda Rhimes hit Scandal, had an abortion in the season finale. “That’s a sign there are folk willing to talk more openly about a topic that has been taboo for way too long,” says Richards.
There’s hope that this cultural shift will precipitate a political one. “This year is an inflection point,” Hogue says. “Change isn’t going to happen overnight. It took us a long time to get into the hole that we’re in vis-a-vis abortion and reproductive rights, but I think we’ll look back and see this as the year that the tide turned, where people started to realize what was at stake.”
She might be right. But when it comes to abortion, 2015 has been a lesson in how the once unthinkable becomes the new normal—and it’s happened with a Democrat in the White House. If a Republican wins the presidency next year, we will likely see 2015 as an entirely different sort of inflection point. Just because things are as bad as they’ve been in 40 years doesn’t mean they can’t get worse.
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oday I went & stood in front of Trump Tower & held a sign until the police came. Then I went home & wrote Donald a letter. Here it is:
f one of the goals of ISIS is to scare the American people, the GOP did them a service on Tuesday night—ratcheting up the fearful rhetoric, and combining it with ideas that were at times ignorant or illegal.
