Category: politics

Some things I’ve been doing, reading, and being worried by (well, more than the usual for 2017)

Doing: 
I’ve talked about 5 Calls before but have also been using and enjoying Resistbot, which lets you text or Facebook message a fax or letter to your officials. (Great when your office is too noisy for a call or it’s late at night.) The more you use Resistbot, the more “features” you unlock–gamification of resistance!

Reading: 
What The F*ck Just Happened Today is where I go for a quick roundup of national news. Somehow having it summarized with no pictures makes it a lot easier to ingest.

The Cut has a long piece about Hillary after the election. It’s frustrating for a lot of reasons but I love me an interview with Hillary.

Clinton asked if the group had heard that searches for the word misogyny rose by 10,000 percent after Amanpour used the word. Can you believe that six months after this election, people still didn’t know what misogyny means? I asked in reply. A smile barely flickered around Clinton’s lips before she deadpanned: “Why, yes. I guess I can believe that.”

 

Worrying:
This is fringe-y but I grew up with the Cold War; it’s easy to accept that Russia is still seeking world domination. Putin’s playbook for discrediting America and destabilizing the West.

Speaking of:

aww yeah the 80s are back baby!

-top gun
-senile moron celebrity president
-blade runner
-fear of russia
-dirty dancing
-synthesizers
-AIDS

— Lana Del Raytheon (@LanaDelRaytheon) June 1, 2017

Yep, these are back. I tried just enjoying spring and thinking about my own little life and what to sew or buy next, but…then you get trailers for The Handmaid’s Tale that make you worry you’re looking at the not-too-distant future, and then the Senate changes the rules to get their way, and then the L.A. Times publishes a six-part editorial on “Our Dishonest President” and you realize: you gotta stay aware. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

From the L.A. Times editorial, part 1:

…nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.

We’re six days into the new administration and if it’s giving you heartburn, here’s some things you can do.

• The Women’s March will be outlining 10 things to do in the 100 days following the marches. The first thing? Download a postcard and write your elected officials.
• Another thing to do? Pick up the phone and call. The65.org (named after the 65 million people who didn’t vote for our current president) has scripts you can use that are updated weekly.

As I understand it, calling and mailing are far more effective than an email, because of the physical reminder. It’s easy to set an auto-responder for an email and never look at it, but when your staffers are too busy answering phones to do anything else, it gets noticed.

(Utah people, Orrin Hatch, Career Politician, is on the Education Committee in charge of Betsy DeVos’ confirmation. Call if you can.)

I didn’t watch any of the inauguration but you better believe I followed the women’s marches happening over the weekend:

…women’s marches that happened on seven continents, btw. This is Antarctica:

(Photos of some of the best signs via Buzzfeed; see pictures of marches all over the world at the NY Times.)

And in case anyone was wondering:

• “Alternative facts” are LIES, for the love of god.
• It’s always OK to punch a Nazi, NYTimes. Hope I can clear that up for you.

“One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”

-Hillary Clinton, writing not this year or 20 years ago but in 1969 in her commencement speech to Wellesley College, which you can read in its entirety here.

America, we don’t have time for fear. And Hillary, thank you for being brave.

I think there is no more accurate electoral map than this one, via Doc, from here:

I early voted over the weekend and I hope you do too–even if you’re “not excited” about the candidates, even if you think your vote won’t matter. Once upon a time women couldn’t vote, we didn’t have labor laws, and being gay was a crime. Things CAN change and they change with ballots.

Here’s your weekly read about campaign strategy, according to Vox.com: “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Drumpf campaign in ruins.”

I thought it was fascinating, especially this point (emphasis mine):

The dominant narrative of this election goes something like this. Hillary Clinton is a weak candidate who is winning because she is facing a yet weaker candidate. Her unfavorables are high, her vulnerabilities are obvious, and if she were running against a Marco Rubio or a Paul Ryan, she would be getting crushed. Lucky for her, she’s running against a hot orange mess with higher unfavorables, clearer vulnerabilities, and a tape where he brags about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

There’s truth to this narrative, but it also reflects our tendency to underestimate Clinton’s political effectiveness. Trump’s meltdown wasn’t an accident. The Clinton campaign coolly analyzed his weaknesses and then sprung trap after trap to take advantage of them.