LIFE IN “TRUMPLAND”
COMMENTARY AND COMPILATION
BY LUCY MANESS WARNER
JANUARY 13, 2017


IF YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE THAT TITLE, GO TO THE MICHAEL MOORE NARRATION AND STAGE SHOW CALLED “MICHAEL MOORE IN TRUMPLAND.” IT IS TOTALLY APROPOS, NOT BECAUSE HE CAN FORETELL THE FUTURE, BUT BECAUSE HE IS COURAGEOUS ENOUGH TO READ THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL OUT LOUD. HIS PROFOUNDLY SAD SHOW INTRODUCING THE NATION OF “TRUMPLAND” -- WHICH WAS MADE ONLY TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT, AND FIRST SHOWN THE DAY BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION -- IS IN MY OPINION SPECTACULARLY GOOD. I DO LOVE THE TRUTH WHEN I HEAR IT.

OF COURSE, I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED MOORE’S SENSE OF HUMOR AND I AGREE WITH HIS IDEAS. HE HELPED BERNIE SANDERS IN HIS PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST, NOT SURPRISINGLY; AND LIKE SANDERS, HE IS NOT A “RADICAL” AT ALL, BUT AN HONEST AND CARING MAN DEDICATED TO WORKING FOR THE TRIUMPH OF GOOD OVER EVIL. IF SOME OF YOU THINK THAT IS A BIASED AND HYSTERICAL STATEMENT, JUST WAIT. GET YOUR NEWS FROM INTERNET SOURCES, THE BBC OR NPR). FOR NOW, DO READ THE ARTICLES BELOW. ALSO, PLEASE LISTEN TO THE BLOCKBUSTER SONG "I THINK IT'S GOING TO RAIN TODAY," WRITTEN AND SUNG BY NINA SIMONE. SEVERAL OTHER ARTISTS DID VERSIONS, ALSO, INCLUDING MY PERSONAL FAVORITE, SUNG BY BETTE MIDLER.

ABOUT MICHAEL MOORE, THOUGH HE IS DECIDEDLY A HOMELY MAN LIKE ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HIS NOTHING LESS THAN BRILLIANT IDEAS, COMMITMENT TO A GOAL THAT AMERICAN PATRIOTS SHOULD ALL ESPOUSE, AND HIS GENTLE PERSONAL ATTITUDES SHOW THROUGH IN HIS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS AND VOICE, WHICH ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL. PEOPLE LIKE THAT GIVE ME FAITH. BE SURE TO LOOK CLOSELY AT THE AUDIENCE PORTRAYAL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ON HIS FILM, “MICHAEL MOORE IN TRUMPLAND.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/movies/review-michael-moore-in-trumpland.html?_r=0

MICHAEL MOORE IN TRUMPLAND
Directed by Michael Moore Documentary 1h 13m
By NEIL GENZLINGER
OCT. 19, 2016

Photo -- The filmmaker in a still image from “Michael Moore in TrumpLand,” released in a surprise sneak preview Tuesday night in Manhattan. Credit Dog Eat Dog Films
Photo -- A promotional image of Mr. Moore’s new film.
Photograph -- Mr. Moore in May at the Webby Awards in New York. Credit Andy Kropa/Invision, via Associated Press


Sure, maybe. Or maybe not. Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny, momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it. Against the rest of his work (“Bowling for Columbine,” “Roger & Me”) it’s fairly tepid stuff. (As of Tuesday night, it was booked for a run at the IFC Center and a theater in Los Angeles.)

But if the film doesn’t shock or enrage, it is accidentally revelatory. The performance in Wilmington was filmed just as the 2005 tape that captured Mr. Trump talking about groping women was hitting the news; Mr. Moore’s stage material contains no mention of that controversy, which has since consumed the presidential campaign. So at this juncture his film is, if nothing else, a stark contrast to all that has transpired in the last couple of weeks. It’s surprising to hear someone extolling a candidate’s virtues rather than just harping on what’s wrong with the opponent — it’s surprising to hear, in other words, why we should elect someone rather than why we shouldn’t.


“Michael Moore in TrumpLand” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes.

Michael Moore in TrumpLand
Director Michael Moore Star Michael Moore Running Time 1h 13m Genre Documentary
Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Last updated: Nov 11, 2016



ABOUT “DEMOCRATIC NORMS,” AND WHY I CARE. WHY? BECAUSE I WAS BORN IN 1945 AND EDUCATED IN AN ATMOSPHERE OF DEEP PATRIOTISM, BUT TIME AFTER TIME THOSE VIEWS WERE LOUDLY PRAISED BY REPUBLICANS AND OTHER “CONSERVATIVES,” WHOSE UNFORTUNATELY CYNICAL VIEW, WAS THAT THE ONLY IMPORTANT THINGS TO WORK FOR AND RESPECT WERE THE SUCCESS OF THE VERY WEALTHY IN GETTING MORE MONEY (“MO MONEY MO MONEY MO MONEY”), VERY LITERAL BIBLICAL VIEWS AND “LAW AND ORDER.” PUBLIC PROTESTS BY PEOPLE WHO WEREN’T THE WEALTHY AND POWERFUL WERE DECIDEDLY NOT OKAY. PEOPLE WERE ARRESTED, BEATEN UP, AND KILLED OVER THAT ISSUE. THE MEEK DID NOT INHERIT THE EARTH. I STILL HAVE HOPE THAT WE WILL, IF IT IS STILL HABITABLE BY LIFE FORMS AT THAT TIME.

YES, I QUOTED ANOTHER GREAT MUSICAL REFERENCE IS THE LYRIC ABOVE, “MO MONEY, …” FROM A SCENE CALLED “HOMEBOY SHOPPING NETWORK” ON A FUNNY TV SHOW, “IN LIVING COLOR.” TO WATCH IT, GO TO : “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZHApWO7U34”



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/12/was-the-2016-u-s-election-democratic-we-see-7-serious-shortfalls/?utm_term=.a0dd4da14962

Was the 2016 U.S. election democratic? Here are 7 serious shortfalls.
By Dan Slater and Lucan Ahmad Way
January 12, 2017

MONKEY CAGE – ANALYSIS

Photograph -- Residents of Washington line up for early voting in the 2016 presidential election at the Chevy Chase Community Center in Washington on Oct. 29. (Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency)
Play Video 1:23 -- Clinton lawyer accuses FBI of 'extraordinary impropriety'
Photograph -- After reviewing FBI documents made public Dec. 20, Hillary Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, slammed Director James Comey for the letter he sent to Congress shortly before Election Day. (Reuters)
Play Video 3:09 -- How the electoral college works
Image of painting -- With criticism flying about the electoral college, here's what you need to know about our system for electing the president and why the "Hamilton electors" don't like it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)



Since the Cold War, more and more nations have held elections that may be highly competitive — but still don’t meet the minimum standards for being free, fair and democratic. The 2016 U.S. presidential election included some of the same violations of democratic norms and procedures often found in fragile democracies and “competitive authoritarian” regimes. As researchers of such regimes, we considered whether the election passed democratic muster.

Elections may come up short in either of two ways: through procedural abuses, and through violations of substantive norms of democratic fair play. We find both types of problems in the 2016 U.S. election, as we examine below.

1. Manipulating voting rules to advantage one party

Studies of competitive authoritarianism reveal how leaders manipulate laws and state institutions to create an uneven playing field. In the United States, we can find such efforts in some states’ measures to discourage turnout among likely Democratic voters.

[Want to know if the Trump administration will lurch into radicalism? Don’t look at Trump.]

The 2016 election was the first one held after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013. As a result, it saw increasingly restrictive voter ID laws, the shuttering of polling stations in minority-dominated districts and exhortations to “monitor” polls for alleged fraud in nonwhite communities, which reportedly experienced systematically longer voting queues. It’s difficult to assess how much such measures affected turnout. But whether it changes an election’s result, targeting one party’s supporters to discourage or prevent them from voting undermines democracy.

2. Security agencies putting a thumb on the scale

We regularly find law enforcement interfering in a partisan way under competitive authoritarianism and in fragile democracies. In the United States, FBI Director James B. Comey announced that the agency would examine potentially incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server just 11 days before the election, reportedly influenced by an anti-Clinton atmosphere in the FBI. Arguably, in doing so, the FBI departed from the fundamental democratic principle that security agencies must remain politically neutral.

3. The electoral college’s anti-democratic impact

Perhaps most striking, the United States’ one-of-a-kind electoral college system delivered victory to a candidate who lost the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, or more than 2 percent of the national total.

No electoral winner in any modern presidential democracy has ever lost the popular vote by such a substantial margin.

To be sure, the electoral college has been the law of the land for so long that its sheer continuity represents the rule of law. The vast majority of electoral college winners have also won the popular vote. Rules can be democratic because they protect minorities (like the populations of small states), not just when they empower majorities.

But the electoral college does not promise to protect minorities from “the tyranny of the majority” in the same manner as, say, the Senate does, by enhancing smaller states’ ability to influence legislation. By its very design, the electoral college has always had the potential to disenfranchise majorities in elections themselves. This means it is not counter-majoritarian, as many democratic institutions such as the Supreme Court are. It is anti-majoritarian.

This arguably makes the electoral college an intrinsically antidemocratic institution whose problematic nature has now been dramatically revealed.

4. The growing role of misinformation

Recent studies of competitive authoritarian elections also highlight how leaders undermine informal norms of fair play in ways that do not violate procedural democracy but prevent democracy from functioning effectively.

In particular, misinformation has become central to nondemocratic elections around the world. Of course, politicians always skirt the truth. But until 2016, falsehoods in U.S. presidential campaigns mostly involved misrepresentations of complex policy proposals. By contrast, this election saw an extraordinary number of blatantly false statements. Fake news often overwhelmed factual reporting.

5. Intervention by the “authoritarian international”

Some scholars see an emerging “authoritarian international.” In a number of post-Soviet states, Russia has worked to help elect pro-Kremlin politicians and to discredit democracy as rigged and corrupt.

Here in the United States, intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia worked “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” That included passing compromising material against the Democrats to WikiLeaks — minimally to discredit the election and maximally to tip it in Trump’s favor.

Since democratic elections are by definition sovereign exercises, foreign intervention always carries an antidemocratic taint, whether the United States is intervening or being targeted.

6. Discrediting the electoral process and opposition

Nondemocratic elections consistently feature candidates who decry democratic procedures as a sham and challenge the legitimacy of political opponents and dissenters. Trump frequently called the elections “rigged” and threatened not to recognize the results if they did not go his way. Trump also threatened to jail his opponent if he became president — a power no democratic president enjoys. He also encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies. These were dramatic departures from standard American electoral practice that delegitimize core democratic procedures and principles.

7. Scapegoating and threatening minorities

Finally, ethnic and religious minorities frequently get scapegoated in “illiberal democratic” elections. Racist rhetoric by itself is not typically considered a violation of procedural democracy. Many established democracies have active xenophobic parties.

Yet scholarship in political sociology suggests that the equal protection of all citizens, regardless of race or creed, is a defining trait of democracy, substantively understood. Authoritarianism is often grounded in the idea that some groups are more legitimately national than others. As soon as specific minorities get branded as second-class citizens, their basic political liberties become tenuous.

Racist “dog whistles” are nothing new in U.S. political campaigns. But it is an extraordinary departure for a major party’s presidential nominee to explicitly claim that people of a particular race, ethnicity or religion are threats to national security. Trump repeatedly made overtly discriminatory statements against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, catered to anti-Semitic sentiment and resisted condemning white supremacists who supported him. Such divisive campaign rhetoric paves the way for any perceived threat from Islamic or other minorities to justify a major crackdown on civil rights.

The fate of U.S. democracy ultimately depends more on how Trump uses the powers of the presidency than on how he secured them. Yet democracy itself relies on free and fair elections that guarantee citizens’ equal rights. Examining the 2016 election, therefore, can help us assess whether U.S. democracy is already in serious trouble.

At best, America’s 2016 election showed early symptoms of several of the shortcomings afflicting unconsolidated democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes around the world. At worst, it showed advanced signs of democratic deterioration. Critics of U.S. elections have long decried their oligarchic features. It may be time to pay attention to their growing authoritarian tendencies.

You might also be interested in:

The Cabinet was the easy part. Steering the bureaucracy takes much more work.
When the Russians falsify election results, they may be giving us the (statistical) finger
5 things to learn from the Russian hacking scandal
Yes, the U.S. is becoming more racially diverse. But the Democrats may not benefit.


Dan Slater is associate professor of political science, director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR) at the University of Chicago, and author of “Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia” (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Lucan Ahmad Way is professor of political science at the University of Toronto and author of “Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) and, with Steven Levitsky, “Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War” (Cambridge University Press, 2010).


ANOTHER SAD STORY, WHICH SET OFF MY RANT TODAY:

https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/racist-dairy-queen-store-closed-160221754.html

U.S.Cosmopolitan
Racist Dairy Queen Store Closed
Tess Koman Wed, Jan 11 9:12 AM PST


Deianeira Ford, a biracial 21-year-old woman from Zion, Illinois, visited a local Dairy Queen with her two small children last Wednesday. When her $5 order was wrong, she asked for a refund to which the store’s owner Jim Crichton responded by allegedly verbally assaulting Ford and her children, the Washington Post reports.

In a post that’s since been deleted by Facebook (though it’s unclear exactly why), Ford detailed the alleged incident. After giving her back the $5, Crichton “called me and my children n******; he said I can go back to where I came from," Ford wrote. "He took out his flip phone and he said he would take a picture and put it on Facebook because he wants to show the world what kind of n****** he has to deal with. Then he shut the window and walked away,” she told the Post.

She also said her 3-year-old daughter who’s “a little sponge” asked her “Mommy, we n******?” When she asked for his name to file a report, he reportedly replied he was “Bill Clinton then said better yet I’m Donald Trump."

Ford then called the police from the Dairy Queen parking lot. The responding officer wrote later in a report Crichton “proudly admitted” to using the slur and said he “would be happy to go to jail over the issue,” according to the Chicago Tribune. He also said he was “‘fed up with black people.’” The officer noted Crichton used the N-word “freely to describe black people” in the store.

When contacted by the News-Sun the next day, Crichton denied the accusations. "It's 99 percent lies,” he said. “Her order was confusing, and I told her, 'Here's your money back. This is so far blown out of proportion.”

Two days after the alleged incident, the official Dairy Queen Facebook account informed those who’d complained on behalf of Ford that the Zion Dairy Queen location had “been closed until further notice.” In a more recent Facebook update, Ford wrote Crichton had his license revoked and subsequently lost his franchise.

Ford’s attorney continues to meet with people who’ve allegedly been treated similarly by Crichton, though no one has pressed charges officially yet. Black Lives Matter protestors and other local activists have been organized in front of the Dairy Queen since Saturday.

Follow Tess on Twitter.
Related:

For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.



THIS PAINFUL ARTICLE OF LIFE IN A MODERNDAY TOWN IN THE NORTH, IS SO ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE DIFFICULTY WE HUMANS SO OFTEN HAVE IN DOING THE RIGHT THING, THAT IT REMINDS ME OF ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT SONGS OF THE 1970S SUNG HERE BY THE UNFORGETTABLE BETTE MIDLER. RANDY NEWMAN WROTE IT, BUT THE VERSION I KNEW AT THAT TIME WAS BETTE MIDLER'S. THE LYRICS ARE BEAUTIFUL POETRY, BUT TO GET THE BEST IDEA OF THIS SONG YOU MUST HEAR IT. GO TO YOUTUBE -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pB-wOfhrr0.

I AM REALLY GLAD ABOUT ONE THING IN MY PERSONAL HISTORY. I DID “LEARN TO LIVE,” EVEN IF LIFE TOO FREQUENTLY FELT LIKE A TRAGEDY. THAT IS NO LONGER TRUE FOR ME, THANK GOODNESS. IT'S STILL AN UPHILL TREK, BUT I AM ENJOYING IT. I DO HOPE SOME MIRACLE HAPPENS AND BERNIE SANDERS WILL BECOME EITHER THE VICE PRESIDENT OR THE PRESIDENT. IT WOULD ALSO BE FUN IF DONALD TRUMP WENT TO PRISON, AS HE KEPT SAYING HE WOULD DO TO HILLARY CLINTON.


I Think It's Going to Rain Today
Bette Midler

Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.

Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles,
The frozen smiles to chase love away.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.

Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I'll kick it down the street.
That's the way to treat a friend.

Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.

Lonely, lonely
Tin can at my feet
Think I'll kick it down the street
That's the way to treat a friend

Bright before me the signs implore me
To help the needy and show them the way
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today


Full lyrics http://www.lyricsfreak.com/r/randy+newman/i+think+its+going+to+rain+today_20114144.html




PLEASE CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES AS WELL. THEY’RE ALL PERTINENT, BUT THIS BLOG IS GETTING TOO LONG. RACHEL MADDOW IS ALWAYS INSIGHTFUL AND INCISIVE, AND THE STORY ON COMEY’S INTERVENTION IN THE 2016 ELECTION IS PARTICULARLY SHAMEFUL, BECAUSE THE FBI, DOJ, SUPREME COURT, AND OF COURSE OUR LEGISLATORS SHOULD ALL BE BEYOND SUSPICION. UNFORTUNATELY, THAT HASN’T BEEN UNIFORMLY TRUE IN MY LIFETIME; BUT THANK GOODNESS "LIFE GOES ON," AND "ALL THINGS WILL CHANGE" SOONER OR LATER.


http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/defending-sessions-gop-congressman-sees-war-whites?cid=eml_mra_20170112

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/defending-sessions-gop-congressman-sees-war-whites?cid=eml_mra_20170112

http://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/fbi-probe-launched-into-fbi-actions-ahead-of-election-853474883631