US Politics January 2018: "You All Just Got A Lot Richer"

Meanwhile, down at a certain big football game in Atlanta:

Welcome to Atlanta @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/5e6vnW9fey

— Metro Atlanta DSA 🌹 (@MetroATLDSA) January 8, 2018

But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory pic.twitter.com/AHp8QghzBk

— Metro Atlanta DSA 🌹 (@MetroATLDSA) January 9, 2018

FYI they can't show the stadium on tv because someone has FUCK TRUMP projected on it. Ha.

— RICHARD WADE HOW BOUT THEM DAWGS MORGAN (@studiowade) January 9, 2018

Activist from @MetroATLDSA: "We zoomed Downtown to our favorite location for a farewell beacon [as @realDonaldTrump departed]."#NationalChampionship pic.twitter.com/xo6cGLVcoT

— Sean Keenan (@ThatSeanKeenan) January 9, 2018

xp
https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.Ffa3lL5tD_33uc6D7GJjhgAAAA&pid=15.1&P=0&w=300&h=300

Satan/Gary 2028 - In your heart you know they're the ones.

I've been asked what I would've done with the 'Fire and Fury' cover by some folks who think the existing cover design is a disaster and a missed opportunity, so here is what I might have done with it pic.twitter.com/xV8W3L8oYu

— Edel Rodriguez (@edelstudio) January 7, 2018

i hadn't seen the real cover before: YIKES

Wow.

in other book news:

Toronto Prof's 'Fire And Fury' Book Now A Bestseller Thanks To Donald Trump
The 2008 book about World War II is now on three bestseller lists.
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01/08/2018 15:56 EST | Updated 9 hours ago
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Randall Hansen logged onto Amazon after a few glasses of wine and found that his book was a bestseller.

TORONTO — A Canadian professor's 10-year-old book is back on the bestseller list and he has Donald Trump to thank for it.

University of Toronto professor Randall Hansen published a book in 2008 titled "Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945.''

does it still count as a bestseller after all the copies are returned by the idiots who ordered them

have we done this yet because uh wtf

Just saw @Oprah's empowering & inspiring speech at last night’s #GoldenGlobes. Let’s all come together, women & men, & say #TIMESUP! #United https://t.co/vpxUBJnCl7

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 9, 2018

"that speech she gave was fucking dire."

I don't think she should run for President either but c'mon, that was not a dire speech.

Sorry IT, but you could have stayed on the sidelines with Tiffany. Wake up to the fact that after your father, contempt will follow you for the rest of your lives.

She could redeem herself if she really wanted to by leaving the admin and becoming a critic of her father

nah she'll wait until he's dead before she makes that pivot

just think of all those lovely 'ivanka trump's road to redemption' headlines

Lol you’re right, that’s definitely what will happen.

It must be hard when your loyalties are divided between the lady who introduced you to Steinbeck and the father who openly wants to have sex with you.

Oprah hates paying taxes, she's said, so there'd be continuity

OOBRHA WINFREDY FOR PRESIDETN

"like oprah being president sounds okay if the extent of your politics is "woke facebook" but where does she stand on, say, Israel?

― Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out. (ulysses)"

i mean, why would this matter? the main thing about having non-politicians for president is that they are more than ordinarily subsceptible to being manipulated by the people around them. in terms of america as a global leader this is obviously a terrible fucking idea, but a late julio-claudian presidency would be improved by not having the worst people in america fighting with each other to decide policy - and i do believe that oprah, if she runs as a democratic, would attract a better class of narcissistic manipulators.

trying to bring back in america where voters make rational decisions motivated by policy and facts is a fool's errand because that america never existed. the most important thing the democratic party needs to learn is to never run an uncharismatic candidate for president again.

Trump was convinced to run and secretly financed by Oprah, who knew that a brief Trump presidency would be enough to get a sizable portion of the skeptical voting public to break down and desperately implore, 'help us, Oprah Winfrey, you're our only hope.'

lmao I sometimes mistake myself for hopeless or cynical and then I read ILX again and remind myself there are greater depths to plumb xp

Speaking of cynical, it's occurring to me lately that I've been feeling something akin to an unconscious need for something overtly catastrophic to occur as a direct result of a Trump presidency, because if we somehow manage to survive (however compromised that survival may be) an entire four years with an anthropomorphized hemorrhoid at the helm, then I have to concede that the office of president basically means nothing. Like, you could place a can of corn somewhere in the Oval Office for four years and achieve roughly the same results.

So why not Oprah. Fuck it.

Would vote Can of Corn 2020.

i think we should all have 15 minutes as president

xp depends on whether the corn is sustainably sourced imo

So why not Oprah. Fuck it.

― Bobby Buttrock (Old Lunch)

basically. i mean as opposed to who? cory booker? mark zuckerberg? my opinion doesn't mean shit when it comes to who runs against trump in 2020. whoever it is i'll vote for them. maybe that vote will "matter", maybe it won't. i'm not putting money down on the horse race.

the letter from holt's counsel to charles harder is so good, and it ends with a dare that's basically "you know that if you sue us, you'll have to crack open all of trump's books, right?"

NEW: Counsel to "Fire and Fury" author and publisher responds to Pres. Trump's legal counsel: "My clients do not intend to cease publication, no such retraction will occur, and no apology is warranted." https://t.co/p1ddu9HPve pic.twitter.com/K1VvetpXYg

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) January 8, 2018

Please, Donald, Don't Sue Them

charles harder is straight-up evil though

also i bet trump is steamed that this letter was written by a woman

Only if the person reading the letter to him mentioned her name. And then very pointedly stated, after locking eyes with the president and dangling a treat before him to make sure they had his full attention, that the name they read was a woman's name.

You know what I like about Oprah Winfrey? I'm pretty convinced that her heart is in the right place. Is she qualified to be President? Oh, hell no. Never in a million years.

Does this matter? I mean, is there a person in this country who could be elected President in 2020 and run America as a functioning democracy? I see no evidence or cause to believe this.

So I'll take what we can get, and what we can get is someone who preaches kindness, rather than the uncompromising ideological cruelty of every single Republican who has held national office in my lifetime.

Between the Oprah speech Sunday night and Kendrick's halftime performance last night, kinda feels like a cultural shadow cabinet taking shape. (I haven't dug into the social media response to Kendrick, but I gather it predictably baffled/outraged a Venn diagram of old/white people.)

I hate to take the bait by taking any of this seriously uhh didn't oprah give poisonous hucksters like Dr. Phil and Oz careers?

there are no good billionaires is basically how i break it down to an extent

Yeah, I mean if we're honestly discussing the prospect (and god knows, we might as well prepare ourselves for the day that it's more than a wild hypothetical), Oprah has shown very poor judgment wrt the people whose careers she's launched.

With the way things are shaping up it seems quite likely that there will be Dem majorities in every branch in 2020, and that things should therefore be able to function quite well. It seems like a good year for a competent candidate with big ideas, compared to 2016, where the job of any Dem president would just have been to stave off the GOP lunatics and hope the chaos died down / stuff the courts. Which is again why no-idea Hillary would have been perfect, sigh. Oprah would probably have been a better choice then, though.

cultural shadow cabinet taking shape

Nice phrase, and it'll piss off white people

watched Kendrick last night, he didn't veer off script did he? played the hits, etc.

I hate to take the bait by taking any of this seriously uhh didn't oprah give poisonous hucksters like Dr. Phil and Oz careers?

― Simon H.

oh yes, she's grossly incompetent when it comes to evidence-based medicine. considering a good chunk of my job involves combating medical quackery, which is hard enough as it is, oprah as president would almost certainly make my professional life way, way more difficult.

but if she can go on tv and convince america that anybody who thinks poor children with cancer deserve to die is a bad and wrong person, it's worth it.

there are no good billionaires is basically how i break it down to an extent

― pee-wee and the power men (bizarro gazzara)

there are no good people. the sooner we collectively accept that the better a chance we have.

rusho if you really believe that why do you care about anything

because my values are not based around dividing the world into "good people" and "bad people"

yes i know i directly used the phrase "bad and wrong person" two posts ago, oh fuck it i can't express moral nuance on the internet, i'll see y'all next month

delusional donald divides us

p sure nuance is illegal on the internet

but if she can go on tv and convince america that anybody who thinks poor children with cancer deserve to die is a bad and wrong person, it's worth it.

yeah she should go on tv and convince people that poor children with cancer should be treated with homeopathy instead

no-idea Hillary

Oh god can we please not keep saying this? You don't have to like her or her politics, but it is utterly false to say she had no policies on offer other than being non-Trump. There were, and are, hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff.

yeah she should go on tv and convince people that poor children with cancer should be treated with homeopathy instead

― pee-wee and the power men (bizarro gazzara)

baby steps, bizarro. baby steps.

look i know we all like to have fun here on ilx but srsly there is no reality where a genuine answer to our current political problems is putting more billionaires in charge

the fact that billionaires can exist at all is one of the most serious problems at the heart of the system

Oh god can we please not keep saying this? You don't have to like her or her politics, but it is utterly false to say she had no policies on offer other than being non-Trump. There were, and are, hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff.

― and she could see an earmuff factory (Ye Mad Puffin), 9. januar 2018 16:09 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In her own description of the campaign, she admits that she didn't run on big ideas because they would have been impossible to enact, and that this probably was a mistake. I agree, she had a lot of good policies, that speech in Harlem is still inspiring, but it's not wrong that she ran on being a caretaker. Which of course is all that any Dem candidate could have hoped for, so it continues to be a plus in my book.