Monday Open Thread

19 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes us on a trip through the minds of Trump supporters.

   Yes, our schools have failed us all.

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2. This is absolutely appalling. I truly hope these are "just actors". Just a spoof, just satire. The animatronic dog is a big clue that might be the case. But the line between spoof and reality is getting blurrier every day.

   And I don't think you can blame it just on schools, Zap. Politicians and corporate media have also numbed out the shocked morality reflex.

   Nevertheless, Sanders and Clinton together received about 28 million popular votes. Donald Trump? about 11.7 million popular votes.

    

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   1. I assume zap is joking about the schools.  What we have is a collapse of societal civility.  You can't just compare clinton/sanders votes to trump.  Don't fotget the cruz /cristie  crowd wasn't exactly morally uplifting.

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      1. a "lack of civility" doesn't explain someone's irrational urge to put weapons in a public restroom to protect oneself from a non-existent bathroom marauder of indeterminate gender.

         and agree it's not primarily schools, or even "teachers' unions" or "the bureaucracy" or "common core" or whatever RepubliCons are blaming the monumental ignorance on:

         No, Trump and his hateful minions did not suddenly descend from outer space to invade America in 2015.  Rather, they have been purposely and assiduously cultivated by conservative elites since the 1950s.  Indeed, the conservative base is so secure in its convictions, so well organized and so motivated precisely because they are the armies of voters that the GOP has been training and empowering for decades.

         In other words, what we are seeing in the Republican party today is not truly a war of two opposing factions but the spectacle of the faction that has long been used by the other finally claiming the driver’s seat.  Election after election, Republicans have stirred up their masses with all kinds of absurd propaganda in order to get them to vote for policies that overwhelmingly favor corporations and the wealthy.  This time, the nativists want to put their man in the White House to make sure they don’t get fooled again. 

         That said, it’s important to realize that their actual agenda is only marginally different from the corporatists, as the conservative noise machine has done such a fantastic job getting poorer whites to accept and internalize the agenda of the 1%. The nativists still dutifully believe that climate change is a hoax, just as Exxon-Mobil and the Koch Brothers taught them; they still support tax cuts tilted to the super-rich and deregulation to let corporations continue to rip them off and poison their air and water.

         Indeed, it’s pretty clear that if Trump were sane, stable and savvy, the GOP would back him unequivocally rather than in the reluctant and awkward way they are doing now.

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         1. It's the same old story. Create a monster you think you can control and it always comes back to bite you.

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3. The 'splaining this is going to require should chew up a few news cycles? Sweet Jesus, what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps it was this cash Drumpf saw in the video..

   Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief

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   1. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive".

      That sentence is just plain ol' fun to say….

      just sayin'     

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   2. When your campaign boss works for the likes of Ferdinand Marcos, you have some nerve attacking 'crooked hillary..'

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      1. Amen!

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   3. This is probably actually good news for the Drumpf scampaign . . . 

      . . . it may crowd out, for a day or two, some of reporting on all the preposterous crap that flows from his mouth?!?

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      1. Money bagging in the Ukraine is all a concoction of the biased, liberal-left, media. Yeah, right.

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4. Food for thought. I know this is a foreign policy issue, but you guys are the most intelligent people I know, well some of you, and I would love to keep this debate going.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCMyHJJrdDw

    

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   1. Russia Insider strikes me as being a mouthpiece for Putin and his government.

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      1. He has been used as a ligit source by HuffPost and The Nation but in the cited interview he certainly sounds like at least an apologist for Russia. Found these links to articles that characterize him as just that.

         http://www.rferl.org/content/stephen-cohen-us-scholar-controversial-putin-apologist/26997584.html

         http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/07/stephen_cohen_vladimir_putin_s_apologist_the_nation_just_published_the_most.html

          

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5. And then there's Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, a complete A-hole with no credibility, no class, no common human decency.

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-seth-rich_us_57b1ddede4b007c36e4f5ffa?section=&

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6. Don't forget Asssange is also a rapist.

    

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   1. Alleged but absolutely confirmed A-hole.

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7. For Duke from API via John Oliver.

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   1. ROFLMAO…    Finally….

      Thanks Pcat.

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