1/. OK folks......you have to read this, the best article I have yet seen on the election......
It's Thom Hartmann and what Democrats need to do in the next two years.....
All is not lost. Yet.
— Blue state governors and other officials are working to “Trump proof” their states and agencies. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are seeing record sign-ups, donations are flowing into groups like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, and progressive newsletters like this one are seeing unprecedented levels of new subscribers and supporters. The resistance is energized.
— Trump doesn’t have as big a mandate as the media is promoting: If a mere 155,000 people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (out of a total 12,943,827 votes cast in those three states) had shifted their votes from R to D, Kamala Harris would be our incoming president. It’s true that voters shifted to the right in virtually every race in America, but that should be seen not as a defeat but as an opportunity — much like the one Republicans faced in 1976 and 2008 — for Democrats to reboot the party and reengage in the battle, the subject of this article.
2/. Bob Lefsetz with some excellent insights.....another must read...
His point is the media and information world is fragmented and Democrats need to embrace this, not resist it.....
This story is also targeted directly at us, the over 50's.....excellent insights....
The Beatles were dismissed as teenage tripe until “Yesterday” and “Michelle,” the backwards vocals of “Rain” and “Sgt. Pepper,” and the adoption of the act by Leonard Bernstein and others in the pantheon of artists respected by establishment.
The Beatles wiped out everything that came before except the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, they ushered in a new era of innovation, the world was music crazy.
Just like with the internet.
And the internet is the devil to the establishment. In these days, the east coast elites who control media.
Social media must be stopped. It’s ruining our children. Look at that kid who killed himself over a chatbot. All chatbots must die!
Kinda like in the old days when just a few disgruntled viewers would call into a station and a TV program would be cancelled. The minority would whipsaw the majority.
But the Beatles were so successful they ushered in a golden era of music, at least commercially, that was only threatened at the turn of the century by Napster. The CD is forever! Even though you can now listen to better than CD quality on numerous streaming services, including mainstay Apple.
Someone asked me how the Democratic party could turn it all around.
I said it would happen when the baby boomers died. And maybe some of the Gen-X’ers too.
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/09/changes-3/
3/. An article on the Democratic Party, and their complete failure....
It seemed as if nature was telling us something: Wednesday, Nov. 6, wasn’t just an unseasonably warm day across eastern North America but a record-setting mini-heat wave. Temperatures broke 80℉ in New York, Boston and Washington — for our international readers, that's about 27℃ — in all cases exceeding record highs for the date by at least three degrees.
You can read that as a fluke, a demonstration of climate change or a metaphor: What had unfolded over the previous night and into early Wednesday morning was certainly a form of explosive combustion. Donald Trump’s sweeping victory across all the so-called swing states and in the national popular vote wasn’t just a defeat for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Losing the U.S. Senate seats in Ohio and Montana, although disappointing, could be understood as the normal operation of pendulum-swing electoral politics. Trump’s massive win could not.
What has befallen the Democratic Party in 2024 is a catastrophe, and it must be understood in those terms. If the party and its larger constituency of supporters fail to understand this as a moment of reckoning — one that demands a fundamental reconsideration of what the Democrats stand for and whom they represent — the catastrophe could prove fatal.
4/. Tom Tomorrow on how we all feel......
5/. Andrew Sullivan with a challenging post.......he's definitely right about some things......
Not all of it, but some!
This last decade or so, we’ve heard an awful lot about the new fragility of American democracy. So it bears noting that, after much angst, we somehow pulled this election off. Kudos to the election workers. Kudos to the voters for providing a clear and decisive result. Kudos to Harris for the graceful concession (in stark contrast to Trump in 2020). We have not lurched into another crisis of democratic legitimacy. No windows are being smashed; no statues are being torn down.
And there is, yes, a mandate. When one party wins the presidency, Senate, and probably the House, that’s usually the case. But this year, the policy divides were particularly clear, and the shift so clear and in one direction everywhere. Americans have voted for much tighter control of immigration, fewer wars, more protectionism, lower taxes, and an emphatic repudiation of identity politics. In the immortal words of Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” We’ll soon see how that pans out.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-energizing-clarity-of-democracy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61371&post_id=151241756&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cwgv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
6/. Careful with those lawn signs next year.....
7/. Thom Hartmann....always interesting.....
We just elected a guy who’s fine with the planet melting down, kids getting shot in school, insurance companies going back to denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and wants to weaponize the federal government in a way dictators do.
What happened?
Democrats thought the 2024 election would be all about Donald Trump’s embrace of fascism and the future of our democracy. And abortion.
Pretty much all of us thought that. As did most of the news media and pundits.
But now that the exit polls and research are largely in, we’re finding, instead, that the election was all about who’d be best able to “blow up the system.”
By “the system,” voters didn’t mean democracy (although we may get the end of that); they meant the neoliberal system that Ronald Reagan introduced to replace FDR’s New Deal policies in 1981 and was subsequently embraced by Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
In other words, they said, “We want the jobs like we had before Reagan’s neoliberalism, when one person could support a household.”
8/. Jon Stewart interviews Heather Cox Richardson......
It's an hour, she is excellent and you will feel better - a must watch, make the time!
9/. What might happen in Trump #2 - doesn't mean it will, but it could......
Are you ready for Trump unbound? You may have thought the former and future president was already pretty unrestrained, not least because Donald Trump has never shown anything but brazen disrespect for boundaries or limits of any kind. And you would be right. But, as an earlier entertainer turned president – and Trump combines the two roles – liked to say: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
That’s because the 47th president will enter the Oval Office free of almost all constraints. He will be able to do all that he promised and all that he threatened, with almost nothing and no one to stand in his way.
10/. Weekend Update....the boys have some fairly good zingers.....
11/. I dislike David Brooks, the right wing columnist for the Times, but this is an interesting piece [for a change].
I like the title - "Voters to Elites - Do You See Me Now?"
We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.
Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-elites-working-class.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
12/. Wolf Hall - "The Mirror and the Light".....a five star review from the Guardian.....
Series One is on Amazon and you can buy the series for $8.....series 2 is coming on March 23 on PBS,
but in the meantime watch Series 1....
The reason you've never heard of this is that it was on PBS.....
It seems pleasingly apropos that it is almost impossible to believe that the adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall appeared on our screens almost a decade ago. Whether you were reading her masterpiece or watching its fruits, carefully peeled and arranged for our delectation by screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky, the years between us and the Tudors shrank to nothingness. Time no longer.
The 2015 series covered the first two books in the trilogy – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – taking the story of Thomas Cromwell, Putney blacksmith’s boy and adviser to Henry VIII, through the negotiation of the end of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his break with Rome, the crowning of Anne Boleyn and finally – though you ludicrously kept hoping otherwise – her execution, contrived to clear the way for Jane Seymour and the greater possibility of a male heir. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light covers the last volume and final four years of Cromwell’s life. And it does so as beautifully, movingly and immaculately as before. It is breathtaking.
Today's Catholic joke
On a bus, a priest sat next to a drunk who was struggling to read a newspaper.
Suddenly, with a slurred voice, the drunk asked the priest:
"Do you know what arthritis is?"
The parish priest soon thought of taking the opportunity to lecture the drunk and replied: "It's a disease caused by sinful and unruly life: excess, consumption of alcohol, drugs, marijuana, crack, and certainly lost women, prostitutes, promiscuity, sex, binges and other things I dare not say."
The drunk widened his eyes, shut up and continued reading the newspaper.
A little later the priest, thinking that he had been too hard on the drunk, tried to soften him.
"How long have you had arthritis?" said the priest.
"I don't, the pope does" said the drunk.
Today's bra joke
A man walked into the women's department of Macy's in New York City.
He found a saleslady, and told her, "I would like a Jewish bra for my wife, size 34B."
With a quizzical look the saleslady asked, "What kind of bra?"
He repeated "A Jewish bra. She said to tell you that she wanted a Jewish bra, and that you would know what she means."
"Ah, now I remember," said the saleslady. "We don't get as many requests for them as we used to. Mostly our customers lately want the Catholic bra, or the Salvation Army bra, or the Presbyterian bra."
Confused, and a little flustered, the man asked "So, what are the differences?"
The saleslady responded. "It is all really quite simple.
The Catholic bra supports the masses.
The Salvation Army bra lifts up the fallen, and the Presbyterian bra keeps them staunch and upright."
He mused on that information for a minute, and asked "So, what does the Jewish bra do?"
"The Jewish bra," she replied, "makes mountains out of molehills."
Today's Penguin factoid
Dead Penguins - I never knew this!
Did you ever wonder why there are no dead penguins on the ice in Antarctica ?
Where do they go?
It is a known fact that the penguin is a very ritualistic bird which lives an extremely ordered and complex life.
The penguin is very committed to its family and will mate for life, as well as maintain a form of compassionate contact with its
offspring throughout its life.
If a penguin is found dead on the ice surface, other members of the family and social circle have been known to dig holes in the ice, using their vestigial wings and beaks, until the hole is deep enough for the dead bird to be rolled into, and buried.
The male penguins then gather in a circle around the fresh grave and sing:
"Freeze a jolly good fellow."
"Freeze a jolly good fellow."
You really didn't believe that I know anything about penguins, did you?
It's so easy to fool OLD people.
I am sorry, an urge came over me that made me do it!!!
Oh quit whining I fell for it, too.
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