The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    This is not a rehearsal

    By Flavius on Sat, 02/04/2017 - 10:25pm |

    It’s the way things are going to be from now on. Theoretically two minority members are supposed to be present when a senate committee forwards a Presidential cabinet nominee to the full senate.Except when they aren’t. This past week.

    Supposedly it takes  60 votes to stop a filibuster.   Think a Democrats filibuster will prevent  the approval of about- -to- be Justice Gorsuch?  Along with believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

    He's about to be as I just designated him: Justice Gorsuch.Get over it. You can read  on any right wing blog the array of parliamentary maneuvers available to McConnell to  end a filibuster without actually  "cancelling the right to filibuster". 

     What Donald wants,  Donald will get.  For the next 22 months.Or how long it takes  us to elect a Democratic majority..

    What can we do in the interim? All contributions gratefully received.

    Mine:

    o Later, for the criticisms of Pelosi and Schumer. They're perfect.You don't think so? Start thinking so.

    o Forget about challenging   any incumbent Democrat.For any office. They're also perfect. See above.

    o And voting for an "Independent." i.e. throwing away your vote.

    o Mobilizing the base? Yawn. Only if that can be done without adding a few more, any votes to the side that beat us in November. If Sam and Emily Member of the Base  are unable to realize that they must defeat Trump maybe we're better off if they remain unmobilized

    o Demonstrations: Fine . Wonderful . Provided they stay on the sidewalks. Don't stop traffic. End  in 47 hours. Max.

    Americans are marvellous.sympathetic people. Who sympathize with demonstrators who don't inconvenience them. At all.

    o Debate? Is what we do. We let the other side talk. And talk. And talk. We don't chant so they can't be heard.  And carry shields and paint our  faces and all that childish nonsense.Let the fascists speak. Then answer them. It may  be that means we won't be on the 11 O'clock News. Great! Any night that the fascists are on the news and not us is a night we gain votes.

    o In summary. Grow up. 

    edited to correct the last sentence FL

     

                                    

    Comments

    Flavius, Martin Luther King Jr. broke your rules regarding demonstrations.

    Martin Luther King Jr. provoked violence

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/01/dont-critici...

    ​Martin Luther King Jr. blocked highways.

    http://www.theroot.com/mlk-would-never-shut-down-a-freeway-and-6-other-m...

    Martin Luther King Jr. lead multiple protests

    http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0115/Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-8-peaceful...

    Making displeasure over bigotry against minorities and immigrants public is important. 

    Demonstrations are scheduled to defend Planned Parenthood and even science.

    Direct confrontation is the best weapon. Trump supporters view any challenge to Donald Trump as unpatriotic.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 12:04pm

    Voltaire supposedly once accepted an invitation to participate in a night of various forbidden sexual activities.No details provided here.

    A while later when   invited to repeat he declined saying "One a philosopher, twice a pervert."


    by Flavius on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 12:32pm

    I take this to mean that you have no real world support for your reluctance to have continued opposition. There was public opposition during the Civil Rights era. There was continued opposition to Vietnam. There was continued opposition in North Carolina with the Moral Monday's protest. What evidence do you have that shows ending protests early actually works?


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 1:46pm

    A daughter who went door to door for Obama  in Pennsylvania in 2008  stayed home in 2012 because she was' annoyed by Occupy. I think she voted for him  but she certainly didn't work for him. I think she was wrong  BTW  but the question we're debating is not her political commitment  but the effect of intense public protest.

    Good friends led *  the opposition to Vietnam. Which was followed by McGovern's landslide defeat.

    I have exactly the same enemies as you. And applaud the strength of your commitment. But not your tactics.

    * revised by popular demand

     


    by Flavius on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 7:40am

    Flavius, I try to provide data that supports the opinions of others rather than just my personal views. Your family example is quaint but if I said a friend voted for Trump because he objected to Hillary, his action did not mean that that is how the majority of people voted. I doubt that you can prove that many people found OWS as a reason to stay home in 2012. 

    You blame the McGovern loss on protestors. I seem to remember a confused Democratic Convention, a Vice Presidential candidate with a history of mental illness that was shocking at the time, and something called Watergate. As I recall Nixon resigned. You see all those factors and place the blame of the loss on the protesters.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern_presidential_campaign,_1972

    You don't like protests. You don't have to make up stuff. Just say that you, personally, don't like protests.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 5:08pm

    So far, the people demonstrating against this administration are pretty darn normal.
    There is going to be a march of scientist to protest the administration. That will be a first.
    This is not a generational divide that shaped much of the politics of sixties.
    That isn't to say that your view of the tactics is not germane. You are concerned about a particular reaction.
    What is this reaction?


    by moat on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 9:59pm

     The airport protests were a win for the good guys  as truly spontaneous protests mostly are. So was the women's march.

    Berkley,conversely , was a life jacket for Trump in the middle of a stormy week, the reaction I fear. 


    by Flavius on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 10:41pm

    Flavius, the majority of Americans in the North and South thought that Martin Luther King Jr. was pushing too fast. People today think BlackLivesMatter is pushing too fast. Moral Mondays is pushing too fast. You direct your concern at Progressives for protesting too much. You get the vapors about small groups of violent protestors. You ignore the big threat. States are creating laws that outlaw peaceful protests.

    https://theintercept.com/2017/01/19/republican-lawmakers-in-five-states-...

    The danger we face is from reactionaries. Reactionaries view any protest against their viewpoint as unlawful. Given the fact that legislators want to put laws limiting free speech in place, isn't that where we need to focus our efforts?

    Reactionaries will make up crap to anger their base. Hillary has a child porn ring in a pizzeria. Protestors are paid by Soros. There was a massacre in Bowling Green. We cannot make excuses for people who want to stifle protest, they will create their own fantasy to justify their faith in Trumpism. The big threat to society is Republican authoritarian legislators.

    If a person is upset by OWS and/or BLM, they are easily swayed to act against their own interest. The protests are energizing a large segment who either would vote for the Democratic Party in 2018 rather than vote third party. The protests are also energizing people who stayed at home in 2016.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 12:05am

    I'd go with Flav here - the war in Vietnam was over when the hardhats took up the resistance too. Occupy Wall Street conversely never grabbed the imagination and action of the general public. It's not really about "speed" - it can go fast enough if you do the right things, though throwing a successful protest movement isn't easy - inertia is with the power holders. Failure doesn't necessarily mean you did all that bad, but it's still failure. BLM is still largely known for some in-your-face, not very enlightened confrontations. They may have moved the peg a bit, but I don't see them taking much to the endzone.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 2:00am

    This is using a crazy metric. Currently we are battling decades of wingnut propaganda. Martin Luther King Jr.  began with the bus boycott after Rosa Parks arrest in 1955. The Civil Rights bills didn't pass until 1965.

    https://www.britannica.com/event/American-civil-rights-movement/Montgome...

    We are still battling for Civil Rights. People were angered by King's protests. Even some blacks said that he was moving too fast. That argument is ridiculous. Protests disrupt. The general population simply doesn't want to be bothered. The Vietnam protests did move the needle. Ferguson led to dramatic changes in their judicial system. Baltimore led to a DOJ review that resulted in documenting police abuse. Sessions is going to quash the Civil Rights Division and police review. The proper response to that backlash is resistance. People will get pissed off when there is pushback against a reactionary DOJ. The white backlash is predictable. There will be backlash against any legal action taken. Those fighting for justice will be labeled as supporting crime. The opposition is always going to oppose no matter what form the protests took.

    Flint, Michigan has been relatively quiet. Look at the tremendous progress they have seen

    http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fast-facts/

    There was a faster pace in Ferguson and Baltimore.

    Trump will have Sessions nationalize Stop and Frisk, something that will also call for resistance.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/28/trumps-fa...

    Sitting home is not an option. Backlash from the public is the norm. The protesters are not the problem. The complacent public is the problem.

    Edit to add:

    Protests keep the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Stop and Frisk, Ferguson, and Baltimore in the public eye. For all the public cared, the people of Flint could all have been poisoned.

    We always hear the same arguments about protests.

    http://www.alternet.org/activism/protests-against-trump-are-effective

     


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 8:47am

    Sorry, BLM in general is not MLK or even Ferguson. I'm not saying "sit home", and backlash from the public doesn't mean you're dong well even if it's "the norm" (and I think there are gradations of backlash). From the LA Times:

    Within minutes, the group of 100 to 150 agitators had smashed half a dozen windows with barricades, launched fireworks at police and toppled a diesel-powered klieg light, which caused it to burst into flames.

    “They didn’t come to lock arms and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor and spokesman for the UC Berkeley. “They came to [mess stuff] up,” he said, using stronger language.

    While so-called black bloc agitators have become a fixture of Bay Area demonstrations in the last decade, their appearance at Berkeley on Wednesday and otherwise peaceful demonstrations threatens to inflame tensions in an already polarized nation.

    ...

    The self-described anarchists or antifascists have left school and law enforcement agencies struggling to cope with their tactics. 

     Moving officers into Wednesday night’s melee, would have created "a lethal, horror situation," said campus Police Chief Margo Bennett. 

    "We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint," she said.

    UC Berkeley officials are now talking with federal and local law enforcement agencies about how to address black bloc tactics, which first appeared in Europe in the 1980s but have grown increasingly common in the United States in recent years. 

    To be sure, the University of California  system has seen far larger disruptions by ordinary students. Window breaking and barricade tossing were common during Regents meetings when tuition was being raised significantly in the last decade, and protesters at UCLA trapped the Regents and other UC officials in a meeting building and garage.

    But even though there was only one arrest Wednesday night, Berkeley officials insist the incident was something altogether new. 

    The cops in Berkeley are usually not the enemy - campus protests are normal free speech there. Making them bullies, or putting them in the middle of a shitstorm, is a bad move and takes the focus off the target of the protests.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 9:17am

    This was one protest. The article states that there were larger more violent protests over tuition.

    The Berkeley protest was about curtailing free speech. The better option was to let the bigot speak and hang himself. This seems to be an isolated incident not tied to protests like Moral Mondays, the Women's March, and immigration protests. 

    Edit to add:

    BLM is obviously not MLK. However if BLM created disruptions in Flint or at the state capitol, resolution may have been swifter in getting drinkable water to the citizens. Flint was a slow poisoning that the Governor was in no rush to resolve because there was no true public protest.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 9:38am

    The other important message that is glossed over is the message sent to the oppressed. While people worry that the protests may offend the oppressors, there seems to be little concern that you tell the oppressed that they are not worthy of concern.  Change takes time. The oppressed need to know that people are fighting for them. Protests help. The cure for protest fatigue are a few victories. Ferguson saw judicial change, Civil Rights laws were passed. Stop and Frisk was more limited in scope, and crime still went down. You gain no friends among the oppressed by telling people to "cool it". You merely give aid and comfort to the oppressor.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 9:18am

    Language Nazi here - twice in one thread, sigh - it's catching on like the coming plague - even the NY Times is doing it, slackers as we've all become in these smartphone/twitter typing days, so...

    The past tense of the English verb "lead" is "led", like the famous rock 'n roll band who are also famously past, though they are named not after an Anglo verb but rather a German adjective meaning "plumbum" in Latin, "lead" in English (rhyming with "sped", not "spead", which doesn't exist, though "spread" does), a heavy metal what would not have allowed a dirigible to stay aloft, and while that's not what actually crashed the famed Zeppelin in New Jersey (not too far from Madison Square Gardens, but not close enough), it was spawned from a yuck about "going over like a lead balloon", from the jokesters who turned a cockney "Jamaica" into "D'yer Maker", a pun mostly lost on a generation of heavy metal headbangers . And as I was informed early on, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't lead a horticulture. Whether you led her astray is also doubtful, nor did she lead you on. Capish?

    I also suspect Occupy got the lass annoyed rather than annoyed her, but that's another rant.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 5:41pm

    Yew remind me of an ant who had a cents about aloud tents and write use of language, sighting errors that wood make my hare stand on end.


    by NCD on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 10:39pm

    A luverly errur is like an arrow (makes me quiver) - a respite from dirigents, a launchpad for poits. But a causal poplar errrar is s'thing 2 abandon - two mundane for inspearation, two disheoveled for admiration.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 2:11am

    Your quivers must be shivering ... the White House is calling.  ;-)


    by barefooted on Wed, 02/08/2017 - 1:10pm

    Where is Dickday? You have an award coming for best blog title. The rest is good too. 


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 02/05/2017 - 11:51pm

    It was ever thus.

    "Full many a gem of purest ray serene" etc. etc.

     


    by Flavius on Mon, 02/06/2017 - 7:55am