Sunday Open Thread

Posted on December 30, 2018 by rikyrah

Good Morning. I hope that you are enjoying today with family and friends.

This entry was posted in Current Events, Music, Open Thread, Politics and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

32 Responses to Sunday Open Thread

  1. rikyrah says:
    December 30, 2018 at 8:50 pm

    Media Alerts:
    Casablanca is about to come on TCM at 10 pm EST

    Tomorrow morning, beginning at 8:45 am EST, they are going to have a Thin Man marathon until 6pm. EST

    Reply
  2. eliihass says:
    December 30, 2018 at 5:38 pm

    Happy Sunday evening, fam.. As we enjoy the last hours of 2018 – and the usual raucous crowd of ankle-biters stand on the sidelines mute and wringing their hands, here’s a little refresher from days of yore..

    Dec 17, 2013 4:09 pm ET (Peggy Noonan) Ha!

    “…Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble.

    I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.

    My worries came home with a certain freshness after the Mandela memorial..

    It all looks so lax, so loosey-goosey. In the place of the energy and focus that would go into the running of things, the administering and managing of them, we have the preoccupation with spin, with how things look as opposed to how they are. The odd thing still is that the White House never misses a speech, a list of talking points, an opportunity to shape the argument on TV. They do the talking part, but the doing? They had 3½ years to make sure ObamaCare will work, three years to get it right top to bottom, to rejigger parts of the law that they finally judged wouldn’t work, to make the buying of a policy easy on the website. And they not only couldn’t do that, which itself constitutes an astounding and historic management failure, they make it clear they were taken aback by their failure. They didn’t know it was coming! Or some knew and for some reason couldn’t do anything.

    And it’s all going to continue. One reason this scandal isn’t Katrina is that Katrina had a beginning and an end. The storm came, the storm left, the cleanup commenced and failed and then continued and succeeded. At some point it was over. ObamaCare will never be over. It’s going to poison the rest of the administration. It’s the story that won’t go away because it will continue to produce disorder. Wait, for instance, until small businesses realize it will be cheaper to throw their people off their coverage and take the fines than it will be to reinsure them under the new regime.

    I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”

    I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.

    “They mistook the White House for the government,” said an experienced old friend, a journalist and Democratic sympathizer. We were having holiday dinner and the talk turned to White House management. His thesis was that Obama and his staffers thought they could run the government from there, from the White House campus, and make big decisions that would be executed. They thought the White House was the government, but the government is a vast web of executive agencies that have to be run under close scrutiny, and within their campuses, to produce even minimally competent work.

    I have come to see this as “West Wing” Disease. Young staffers grew up watching that show and getting a very romantic and specific sense of how government works. “The West Wing” was White House-centric. It never took place at the Agriculture Department. But government takes place at the Agriculture Department.

    Anyway, my friend made me think of a story about Harry Truman. On leaving the White House after the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower, Truman made a small prediction about the general and his presidency. From memory: Eisenhower, Truman said, will pick up the phone and say do this and do that, pull this lever, and he’ll be shocked when nothing happens.

    Ike was a general used to giving orders within an organization that takes the order and executes. But a government has to be leaned on every day, through management talent earned by experience. Generals can issue orders but federal agencies must be gently guided and clubbed around the head, every day.

    People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.

    Most of the Obama people don’t have a background in executing…”

    https://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/12/17/incompetence/

    Reply
  4. rikyrah says:
    December 30, 2018 at 12:41 pm

    Did you see that Ain’t Shyt Kelly is trying to do a rehabilitation tour?

    That, of course, the wall isn’t REALLY a wall…

    And, that all the racist shyt down at the border is really the KKKeebler Elf’s doing.

    Mannnnnnnn…..

    “They will be put in foster care……..OR WHATEVER”

    Referring to stolen migrant children.

    He should NEVER be allowed to walk away from that comment.

    I will repeat…

    John Kelly ain’t shyt.

    Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    December 30, 2018 at 12:20 pm

    The Path to the Presidency Could Be Harder for White Democrats in 2020
    An assessment of what happened in 2016 shows that Trump’s continued race-baiting might make his opponents’ task harder.
    By JAMELLE BOUIE

    …………………………………

    From the start, Donald Trump ran an openly racist campaign of agitation and disdain toward immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, and likewise, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign emphasizing tolerance and racial diversity. They were asking Americans to vote on the basis of national identity: Who should America be for? In response, white voters sorted themselves according to their racial views: If you held negative attitudes toward blacks and immigrants, believed racial inequality was a result of individual laziness or cultural pathology, or thought nonwhites threatened the economic advancement of whites, you were more likely to back Trump. If you believed the reverse, you were more likely to back Clinton. Account for education, and the result is the same.

    The number of white Republicans with liberal racial views was low enough that there weren’t many defections. But the number of white Democrats with conservative racial views was significant—and critically, those voters were clustered in key Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin, enough to give Trump his narrow but decisive advantage in the Electoral College.

    Hillary Clinton made plenty of tactical and strategic missteps in her bid for the White House. But it’s hard to imagine how she could have avoided this dynamic. To even win the primary, she had to disavow much of her centrist past and persuade voters of her liberal bona fides. This was most true on issues of racial justice, where Clinton faced a diverse Democratic base with increasingly progressive and outspoken views on issues of race and ethnicity and was tied to the legacy of her husband—whose White House legitimized and expanded on the “tough on crime” policies of his predecessors.

    In moving left, Clinton hoped to flank her opponents and secure her standing. She spoke early and often about “structural racism” and “implicit bias”; she met with representatives of Black Lives Matter and shared the stage with the “Mothers of the Movement”; she embraced undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and described “police violence” as a force that “terrorizes communities.”

    It worked. In 2008, Clinton’s share of the black vote against Barack Obama was just 16 percent. Against Bernie Sanders in 2016, it was 77 percent. And she ran nearly even with Sanders among whites with the most liberal racial views, after losing them by large margins in her race against Obama eight years earlier. But it also came with a cost: In 2008, Clinton won the large majority of white primary voters who attributed racial inequality to “lack of effort”; in 2016, she narrowly lost them—and that carried over to the general election.

    Reply
  6. rikyrah says:
    December 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm

    Interesting comment from BJ:

    Frankensteinbeck says:
    December 30, 2018 at 10:19 am

    I believe there’s a huge element most people don’t get, because they don’t get how racism works. They expect it to be simple and direct, and it rarely is. Obama getting elected, and even more so Obama getting reelected, changed everything. It is totally different when white people are being gracious to blacks and giving them a seat at the table. Note the word ‘giving.’ When Obama actually became president, and was their boss, a lot of people who voted for him couldn’t handle it. Then in 2012, he got reelected despite everyone knowing it was against the will of white America. It wasn’t given. He won it despite them. That was titanic. Even more people who had voted for him couldn’t handle it actually happening. Honestly, the Obama-to-Trump effect wasn’t as big as people think, because there’s always a significant random vote, but those events and those feelings provoked seismic shifts to the right, which includes some people who used to lean liberal.

    Reply
  8. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 30, 2018 at 10:59 am

    This brought back a memory………

    When I was growing up, I had an aunt who learned to drive a car after her husband died. She was 70 something years old at the time. It was a beautiful thing to see.

    https://twitter.com/DonnerKay/status/1079127815050719232

    Reply
    • majiir says:
      December 30, 2018 at 7:16 pm

      My grandmother didn’t learn to drive until she was around the age of 70, too, after my grandfather died. My mom taught her to drive. My grandmother passed the test and bought her first car.

      Reply
  11. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 30, 2018 at 10:40 am

    Look what these savage beasts are doing to children, y’all

    https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1079102587985645570

    Reply
    • eliihass says:
      December 30, 2018 at 4:57 pm

      Stanley wasn’t exactly an upstanding guy… He’s the missing piece of that trifecta that was fired/removed by President Obama …Flynn and Mattis were the other two.. (No, I didn’t forget smarmy adulterer Petraeus who also went on his own pilgrimage to New York and Mar-a-lago)…

      Reply
    • eliihass says:
      December 30, 2018 at 5:05 pm

      I don’t want to rebut this, Sis.. too many feelings are bound to be hurt..

      I can tell you everything I know (and what the opposition will easily be torpedoing with)… but I’m going to keep biting my tongue … because I want everyone to get a fair stab at things during what ought to be a competitive primary..

      But some of this undeserved and unearned mega fluffing-up can tempt one into writing a fact-based, air tight dissertation …

      I know some of my fam here won’t like it… but I’m going to keep saying it, we can do so, so much better ..

      Talking up a slate of mostly mediocre pols (including those being ‘well-thought of’ and being effusively pushed by ‘upstanding’, ‘progressive’ folks like Mika, Hugh Hewitt, Scarborough etc.) …and only because said career pols did some decently pre-rehearsed 15 minute preening for the camera, or because they’ve preemptively ingratiated themselves with the raucous, self-important crowd who think they have the final word …does not a president make..

      We are going to need seriously compelling folks who know what the heck they’re doing, not just to defeat this crazy, but to actually roll up their sleeves, and get to work cleaning up the mess the treasonous buffoon has made and will leave behind – and what a mess! …we need folk who know where the bodies are buried, and how to carefully knit back the intricate fabric of our Democratic institutions and administrative structures that have been completely decimated or seriously damaged.. And no, there won’t be and shouldn’t be a baton-passing V.P to prez deal.. Bloody earn the spot if you’re in fact worth your weight in gold..

      We are too going to need AUTHENTIC (not rehearsed and manufactured which soon falls apart) and we are going to need more than vanity aspirations …we’ll need someone who wants to do more than just be president…

      We will need someone who inspires confidence – and fear when necessary.. sometimes even just by standing there projecting an aura of unspoken power and strength when hanging with other world leaders.. and commanding respect because they know you’re a person of your word.. but you also won’t suffer fools gladly.. And no mealy-mouthing… say what you mean and mean what you say.. even if folks don’t like it..

      Sorry, but we can’t keep going down the path of participation trophy just because folks think we need a particular person/gender/race or a particular pairing structure… this is how we end up getting stuck with candidates who in the end can’t seal the deal.. And even after they’ve flailed and demanded that retired presidents and First Ladies get on the campaign trail to help put them over..

      I don’t know if my fam remember, but we had enough forewarning re: 2016… And it’s happening again – the rumbles locally (in my neck of the woods at least) are mirroring what was happening in 2016 – and no, most of these Dems who picked the ‘businessman’ have dug in, unwilling to concede even if they insist they no longer support him .. and are already expressing displeasure with the candidates being touted (Social media is not a good gauge of what’s happening on the ground – these oppo folks are already busy working their gaslighting on low-info folks and even those who think they’re informed..

      …And this time if we’re not careful, it’ll be far worse …say what we may have about our last candidate, at least she knew her way around the office, and had more than enough clout and gravitas with the international community to make a real difference …A lot of the folks being pushed this go-round, not even..

      Reply
  24. rikyrah says:
    December 30, 2018 at 4:22 am

    Good Morning, Everyone 😄😄😄

    Reply

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