January 25, 2017 Open Thread
Dover looking at future options for City Hall (link)
First hip-hop concert ever at Schwartz Center for the Arts (link)
Delaware Memorial Bridge continues record traffic growth (link)
Outside police agencies to help Wilmington stop crime (link)
Delaware natives Paul Worrilow, Duron Harmon and Jhurell Pressley will represent the First State in the Super Bowl (link)
Photograph by Chuck Kramer.
Orwell’s “1984” is a best-seller again:
Like to see Animal Farm, 1984 and Machiavelli’s The Price be required reading for all students, if your going to be enslaved you should at least have a clue on how they intend to do it.
Though they don’t mention dementia, both Digby and Keith Olbermann are on the same page I am about Trump’s erratic behavior.
Digby floats the same possibility I did yesterday — that Trump can be removed for incapacity much more easily than by impeachment.
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/25/dont-look-now-its-president-pence-donald-trump-can-be-deposed-even-without-impeachment/
Big shout-out to the Delaware United folks. So much to like about last night’s meeting. I’m especially encouraged that this organization is working so closely with like-minded groups. The opportunity for positive progressive change grows every day.
Oh, and Bryan Townsend is/was amazing. Maybe we ARE better off with him in Dover…
Something you can do today to fight Trump: Sign the petition to demand release of his tax returns. It’s at 330,000 signatures and climbing:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/immediately-release-donald-trumps-full-tax-returns-all-information-needed-verify-emoluments-clause-compliance
I’m shocked that they still have petitions open. They don’t do transcripts of press conferences there anymore.
And then call Carper and ask him to support Sen. Ron Wyden’s (Ore.) bill to require all sitting presidents and nominated presidential candidates to release their tax returns for the past three years.
Done. Well, the petition part. Gotta go to work, will call Carper tom’w.
@nemski: Oh, it will come to nothing. I just want to see as large a number as possible, because the bigger the number (see Jan. 21) the harder it is to dissemble away.
Individually, we are ants, easily crushed. But a million ants on the march consume everything in their path.
I want a Millions of Ants March. I want it to end by swarming Congress.
They can talk all they want about the intent of the founders being in favor of rural interests. That was at the dawn of democracy. The reality is that a minority government holds all three branches of that government — two by electoral jiggery-pokery (to borrow their phrase), the third by a 25-year plan to deny confirmation of Democratic presidents’ choices and stacking the courts with radical conservatives when Republicans hold the White House.
The U.S. Constitution is a supremely conservative, property-oriented document. The liberal idea that had to be suppressed was Jefferson’s mighty observation in the Declaration of Independence:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The consent of the governed is the only legitimate power they have. I am withholding my consent. Democrats receive more total votes for every level of federal office, yet that majority at every level — Congress, Senate and President — has gained Democrats exactly no power.
Republicans can argue as much as they like that they simply work the system better. That shows they completely misunderstand that which they claim to revere (they’re the same with Jesus). The object of the system wasn’t to foster gaming it — it was to force government toward compromise. Yet Republicans never look to compromise — like any brainwashed, propagandized mass of people, they seek only to win at every cost.
The biggest lesson I learned from talking to scores of conservatives in DC was that most of them view this as a sporting event. They no more connect it to policy and their everyday lives than they do their favorite sports teams, and their mood goes up and down with the team’s fortunes.
You can’t reason with zombies. You can’t appeal to their conscience. If loved really trumped hate, there would have been no need for the Normandy Invasion.
I don’t even want to fight them. I want us to use the majority that we have — the one of actual people — to simply overwhelm them.
The lie that there is a shortage of skilled workers has been distorting our policies for too long. Looks like the market is starting to see through that lie:
@puck, when have facts ever disrupted the Delaware Way?
This is your Democratic Party, folks:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/25/1624949/-Democrats-are-not-following-the-successful-Republican-2009-oppose-everything-playbook
But it can be this:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/that-sounds-right
Red Alert!
Everything Trump has done until now would have been done by any Republican in the White House.
Here’s where he departs into fascism. The draft executive order on immigration:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/read-draft-text-trump-executive-order-muslim-entry_us_5888fe00e4b0024605fd591d?0lwdu2cbey5htzkt9&