I don’t know if a Trump presidency is a catastrophe, because I don’t know what Trump’s actual policies are going to be.  I don’t think he knows.  I think he’s going to enjoy the power and the attention, and leave the policy to the others.

That’s where the catastrophe might be, because the Congress is suddenly empowered.  I bet there’s a slew of bills that got stuck in the machinery because they’d never get ratified by a Democratic senate or signed by Barack Obama that are suddenly going to make their appearance, and fly through the Congress: abortion law, shutting down the EPA, withdrawal of funding for science, draconian curtailment of civil liberties.  Forget addressing climate change on an international level; as soon as we drop out so will China and India, and we’re done.  That’s on top of the stuff we know they’ll do, like repeal of the ACA, curtailing Medicare and social security, …

The bastion of defense against popular legislation that infringes on the rights of the minority is the courts.  And that’s the third thing that’ll change with the new regime, so I don’t feel confident relying on the justice system to hold the line here (Giuliani as attorney-general?)

So, time for people who care about fixing this stuff to stop being spectators and start making noise.  Find the good stuff and support it (Friends of Friends.  Whidbey Community Solar.  Good Cheer and the food bank.  The sandwich bar behind the community coffeehouse.)  Find the bad stuff, and push on it, hard. (Barbara Bailey, local congresswoman.  Failure of the passage of I-732, the carbon tax for WA.)  Work to change Congress (https://brandnewcongress.org/home)

The institutions are all aligning to make the bad stuff happen, so time for the alternatives.

I thought the Trump presidency would never happen in America.  No-one I knew or knew of had any tolerance for the way he behaved.

I watched his entourage come out on stage last night, and I noticed how short his daughters/in-laws’ skirts were.  We’re not supposed to notice, but we do.  I expect most of the males in the audience did, too; I dunno.  I thought, angry: wait, he’s changed what can be said and done in public over the past year.  It’s expected now that white guys will look at people like his daughters and ogle them, like he does, and talk trash about them with other guys, like he does.  We’re not supposed to express our better natures now, we’re supposed to indulge all our craven, racist, misogynistic, primate-brain irrational male bullshit, because us old white guys just took back the republic.  We get to behave as badly as we want.  Maybe I’m supposed to ogle the President’s family.

So, OK, it’s going to be about individual responsibility now.  Trump behaves like the worst of us, and gets resounding approval from the bulk of the voting public.  The crap comes out of the caves, and I’m going to have to up my game.

Soft Revolvers (long) from Myriam Bleau on Vimeo.  Homemade acrylic spinners with accelerometers, radio and embedded LEDs.

I’ve been trying to divine the future of the Republican Party over the next few years.  Here’s a worst-case take:

The GOP’s Age of Authoritarianism Has Only Just Begun.

and I had a good time! Ref said we came 3rd, though, not 2nd, as we had to twist his arm on an appeal in the previous round.  Love those porcupine outfits.

Postcards From Whidbey Island: Friends Of Clinton Library Spell S-U-C-C-E-S-S | Whidbey Life Magazine.

from the leaked Clinton/Podesta email, regarding the political process:

*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY* *Clinton: “But If Everybody’s Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position.”* CLINTON: You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, “balance” — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think — I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it’s like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13, via http://qz.com/805005/the-leaked-email-behind-hillary-clintons-mid-debate-reference-to-steven-spielbergs-abraham-lincoln-biopic/

The article goes on to say:

Clinton’s takeaway is that even the greatest politicians have to make deals to get things done, sometimes in compromises that get made behind closed doors. It reflects her pragmatism, even if it’s hardly the answer one might want to hear from a potential president.

But that’s exactly the answer “one might want to hear from a potential president”.  Someone who knows how to get things done, and has the skill and connections to do so, even (especially?) at the expense of ideological purity.  Exactly the attributes of presidential politics that we’ve been missing for 8 years, just as was predicted when Clinton lost the primary election last time.

people used to say there was no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?

I’m kind of amazed at how the conventional wisdom is that people are only voting for Hillary Clinton to prevent a Trump White House.

It seems really clear to me that Clinton is:

• experienced; she’s spent years making relationships with people in the Senate, the House, state governments, the administration, the military, business, unions, …
• pragmatic: her policy suggestions are about what can be done from where we are, not where we want to get to with no obvious way to get there. For example, she seems clear on the benefits of a single-payer Medicare-for-all scheme, and equally clear on the upheaval that would cause if implemented overnight;
• productive: for all her opponents’ speechifying, she’s done more as a Senator and Secretary of State than any of them, sometimes despite personal and vitriolic opposition;
• responsive: if there’s one thing that the last few months show, it’s that she can hear dissent, listen to it and modify her own opinions when she’s convinced otherwise.  I don’t want an idealogue for President;
• motivated: she’s clearly in this for the public good.  She has a vision of how America can be, and she wants to use public service to help get it there.  If all she wanted was power and money, she could run the Clinton Foundation and give speeches to the 1% for the rest of her life.

She is not a great orator.  She has made mistakes of judgement (her personal email server, for example, the kind of mistakes I see people making every day sending their tax returns by email).  But she’s clearly, far and away, more than qualified for the Presidency, and I’m enthusiastically looking forward to a Clinton term.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth

I’ve been talking about the inherent sexism of calling Candidate Clinton by her first name, Hillary, while using last names or full titles with the other candidates (“Trump”, “Bush”, …). Then, of course, there’s Bernie, which throws a wrench in my theory.

Ian McEwan has another theory, as evinced by his one-line throwaway in an article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/country-political-crisis-tories-prime-minister): it’s a way to make us disenfranchised plebs more interested in the goings on of the elections.

“Our first-naming paradoxically measures our distance from events.”