Being of Eastern European extraction and of a certain age, and all that history you carry within your bones, has gotten to be so very exhausting in every conceivable way. I say that under the cover of this platform, because I am ashamed, for I know my elders were unimaginably exhausted, and if not for them and their courage, I wouldn't be here at all.
AWESOME news about the Post Office, but I do have a question. You wrote: "Talwani largely stopped the United States Postal Service (USPS) from refusing . . . ". "Largely" implies there's a little piece she didn't stop. Could you elaborate?
This is a great piece today. I think the politics of misery is accurate. Maybe misery and terror? But then we don’t want to be overly dramatic… but you are right to want to create a narrative that we can all tell with pith amd ease. It’s just horrible. I am feeling the Haitians and Syrians today. That’s the terror part.
Oh. Can you please comment on the reversal of the war powers resolution last night? Clown show doesn’t begin to describe them. WTF!
the terror is real. through my working years I had to be very careful where in the US I worked because there were inactive blue laws still on the books that said I could be sterilized due to my disability. a friend's son may die because of this. the attack on employment of disabled people means it's even harder to become employed and keep ourselves housed and fed. (and yeah, my "compassionate conservative" parents threw me out on the street back in the day when they got tired of my 6 seizures every single day. if you can't see that as terror, please just rethink it. it's different when its your lived experience.
thank you kathy. this is heartbreaking. I am praying you have gotten help for the seizures and are managing gracefully. thank you for letting us know. and yes. this is terror. and terrorizing.
I called Congressman Raskin and Senators Alsobrooks and Van Hollen to say that if the Dept. of Defense needs more money, they should reverse the tax cuts on the billionaires. I also said that the president is out of touch with reality and needs to be removed from office. I'm working on postcards to Ohio voters today.
And the attempts at tyranny by the Loser and Convicted Felon and Sexual Abuser who is reported to have been a participant in the sexual abuse of a little 12 year old girl, has been stopped again by a Federal Judge with courage, ethics and knowledge of our Constitutional Protections and Guarantees! 25th Amendment. Trump is suffering from mental deterioration and is unfit to fulfill his duties. And who is Natalie, Donald? Does Melania have morning coffee with her, too? You are human scum, Trump.
Katie Phang is a Shero standing up for free speech and the Epstein abuse survivors. This is an important legal win for investigative journalism! This maga coverup will end, and the perps will be exposed and held accountable.
i stayed up to watch the game too. sorry i did. the usa has still not beaten any european team in the world cup except portugal in 2002. that's a real long time...felt bad for the fans who spent a fortune to watch the b team fail to close out a game. the usa teams have had an issue with this as long as i can remember, letting portugal tie in the last second in 2014 comes to mind. turner, weah, and pepi were all awful. but germany fielded their starters and also lost their final game to ecuador, which needed the win. my bil and niece scored tickets to that game and dazzled us with live photos, wearing their yellow colombia jerseys, they fit right in with ecuadoran fans. tbh, both games were epic, but you hate to be on the losing side. bosnia will be tough; this team eliminated italy from the world cup. i have two teams in this cup, colombia tomorrow which i think is already through. takes my mind off the scotus rulings this week; alito is clearly off his rocker and getting ready to retire imo. incredibly, my other team, italy, has missed the cup 3 times in a row now. not enough younger talent coming up. wife is going to italy in two weeks.
I was sorry to see this team not be the first to sweep all three games, but I wonder if this wasn't an ideal result. With so many key players only subbed on late or not at all (does Guler nutmeg Antonee Robinson or brush him off like he does to Berhalter? Would the US have had *two* midfielders & zero backs challenge Guler if they had more confidence in the backline players on the field? Does Chris Richard mark nobody in front of the goal?), it's not--or shouldn't be--a blow to their confidence, especially given that they had more possession (53-47%), more shots (18-9), more shots on goal (7-3), more touches in the box (36-22), more shots in the box (15-8), and more corners (9-2). But they're not going to be overconfident, they *are* going to be p*****, and I wouldn't want to be Bosnia. Respect for them on eliminating Italy, but when I look at their group games--would this team in this form draw with Canada? Lose to Switzerland 4-1? Beat Qatar only 3-1?
You really hit the nail on the head, I think, re: the players who really let down the side. Weah said as much about himself (said he was the one player who deserved to be subbed off), and for me, he was the most disappointing, because he's been so money for us--how could he not figure out to stop getting called offsides? how could he let the Turks keep muscling him off the ball? The two answers to those questions are probably related. In fairness, I wonder with Donovan whether he wouldn't have fared (a lot) better on the other side of the field--when I picture him at his best, I picture a falcon of a player remorselessly angling in towards goal from the *right.* Meanwhile, it was agony to watch Pepi blow chance after chance, and Turner came up small at least twice when they needed him to come up big.
It was at least an entertaining game, and great to see Pulisic in good health and looking hungry. No suspensions for the next game, and no A-team starters were hurt. (Hope Trusty is ok, showed a lot of guts). I think we are pretty well teed up for Wednesday, and a win there makes last night’s game a distant memory. Nice goal from Berhalter.
Yes, we need to start talking about the politics of misery today before we again get sucked into their trap of directing all the blame to Dems for the Republican messes we will have to spend years cleaning up - as was the case with Biden having to deal with COVID, inflation, etc.
And Clinton after HW Bush; and Roosevelt after Hoover...it's an ongoing recycling of what happens in this country. Democrats get elected to clean up GOP messes, and then the American people forget and the GOP get elected again. Rinse and repeat. I'm so tired of this.
Yes, I hope we NEVER AGAIN take ownership of the problems they caused because we don't like to point fingers or think we don't need to because we can solve anything. That's noble, but until the electorate shows it has the motivation and capacity to understand this, it's going to continue to be literally a self-own. Love the "politics of misery," Simon!!! That's the *perfect* phrase to describe what they've done (misery) and why they've done it (politics)
Thanks for the quick link to your rules. If it had been there the time I posted a rather outlandish prediction and got kicked off commenting for a week, I might have saved that prediction for another forum (I wasn't completely wrong - comrade Krasnov actually did something even worse than whatever I was freaking about in these pages).
That said, I'm going to take a chance on appearing to "worry more and doing less" or at least "worrying more". Please bear with me. I am looking to find out that someone is already doing more about this worry than I had previously known, to find out what more I can do about said worry, and also to get Hopium readers to do more than whatever they've already been doing.
I read a lot about fears of Trump sending ICE to the polls and other efforts to suppress the vote. What I read next to nothing about is the possibility of electronic hacking of the voting and counting machines (Please forgive me if you've addressed this already, and please reply with a link to the article(s) - I have many Substack subscriptions and don't read every writer every day). The reason I'm concerned about that possibility is that such hacking is much cheaper, easier, less messy and more effective than any other method MAGA might use to mess with the midterms. In addition, evidence is finally coming to light that the 2024 election was hacked for Trump. Evidence is also coming to light that the recent wipeout of Thomas Massie in his primary by someone no one has ever heard of is the result of electronic vote manipulation. Trump and Musk have both made statements strongly implying that they rigged 2024.
So - what is being done to protect our midterms from electronic hacking, and how can I help? I already support www.electiontruthalliance.org, but their main focus is crunching numbers and documenting past "funny business".
The Senate Democrats started an election protection task force to game out all the different scenarios for attacking our elections leading up to the November midterms. I don’t know if they have gamed out the hacking scenario, but maybe try contacting the offices of the senators who are on the task force?
They really need to game out the hacking scenario. See e.g. https://substack.com/@thiswillhold I don't know that these guys are right about *2024*, but they're the first folks I've seen who've done an analysis that provides a real evidence-based answer to why the exit polls in *2004* that showed Kerry was going to win the popular vote and the official results differed (specifically, their analysis shows that in places where right-wing companies produced the voting machines being used, there was a fairly consistent rightward shift in results from 2000 to 2004; whereas in places where other machines were in use--mainly in *Republican* areas like the Great Plains and Mountain West--the leftward shift predicted by the exit polls shows up clearly and consistently).
By contrast, neither the completely tautological official report (which claimed: we know the exit polls were wrong because they didn't agree with the official result, and: we know they were wrong because the exits *did* agree with the official results in 2002 and 2006, but not in 2004) nor the psychographic categories made up for the occasion, i.e. the "shy Republicans" who supposedly didn't want to tell exit pollsters who they voted for (which Pew, in 2021, finally pronounced null and void) provide any evidence-based explanation at al (if you're interested, here's more analysis that imnsho eviscerates its successor, "the shy Trump voter" [ https://creativepoli.net/shy_trumpers ] as well as the theory, advanced by certain Democratic politcal consultants, that by attacking the "fake news media" polls, Trump himself discouraged his supporters from responding [ https://creativepoli.net/trump_polls ]).
In desperation, the corporate media even laughably claimed that the exit poll "error" was caused by a "late surge of Republican voters" after the exits were complete--have you *ever* seen a long line of voters at a *Republican* polling place *anywhere* in the last hour it was open? :D. Let alone across the country? And in the end, while the Ukrainians were rising up in in the wake of a similar discrepancy, the media & pollsters agreed never to show the top line (overall) result of exit polls to the public again--you know, so we don't worry our pretty little heads over whether our elections are on the up and up.
In addition to suspicious statements made by Trump and Musk Tracey cites (as well as statements NOT made--eg Trump and Johnson promised to reveal, after the election, the allegedly completely legal tactic Trump was referring to when he said two weeks before the election he had "a secret" that "guaranteed" he'd win--a revelation we're still waiting to hear), there was this curious statement made by a Putin spokesman a few days after the election: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." And the hits keep coming--when Johnson was asked recently about evidence for GOP claims that the LA mayoral election was rigged, he said something to the effect that "sometimes vote changing takes place so far upstream that you can't detect it." Gee, Mike, and how do you know that?
It's possible, of course, that such remarks are merely intended to pysch our voters out of showing up--in the past, the Russians, in particular, have been quite blatant about this, e.g. in 2020, their notorious Internet Research Agency stated that "Soon after November 6, you will realize that your vote means nothing. We decide who you vote for and what candidates will win or lose. Whether you vote or not, there is no difference as we control the voting and counting systems. Remember, your vote has zero value. We are choosing for you.” Which, of course, turned out not to be the case.
And I agree 110% with Simon that our best defense against *any* of this is for as many of us as possible to vote early in person, and get as much media attention as possible on the lines in our polling locations throughout the entire voting period. If the corporate media won't give that story the attention it deserves (like they've never given No Kings, nor have they ever reported accurately on it), we should recognize that they aren't the gatekeepers any more, and that we collectively have more reach and more credibility than they do, and take and share as many videos of what's going on as possible.
I recommend anyone interested in grassroots plans being made to protect our elections to yesterday’s What’s the Plan with Indivisible co-founders Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin
Might you consider calling it the politics of cruelty?
The people of OH and FL voted for this administration, perhaps without any recognition of the cruelty that would be bestowed on their neighbors. The myopic view of way too many Americans is infuriating.
Congress needs to get its act together on immigration and other matters. It became obvious to me in law school, nearly 40 years ago, that far too much governing is ceded to an unelected judiciary and a term limited executive. So, yes, the TPS ruling is cruel and undoubtedly rooted in racism, but the proper branch to lead on the issue is the Congress.
Thanks for your continued leadership and optimism, Simon. I think this recent speech by Tom Hanks at Harvard's graduation speaks directly to building a narrative around the values expressed in our Constitution and our responsibility to foster them. He rambles a bit, but has some really good things to say: https://youtu.be/lVga4CX6kXA?si=wulpJigMI_TrlSWj
Allow me to suggest that what we need is : a politics of happiness
The World Happiness Index has attempted to quantify national satisfaction with their country as rated by the people themselves along various criteria. Our so-called "greatest country" is not even in the top 20. In fact, over the years I've paid attention to this we keep sliding down the rankings.
The founding document that we are celebrating this year, that pronounces the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has not been the lodestar of policy, and becomes less so.
The "right to life" has been hijacked by religious zealots obsessed with controlling everyone's sex life, attributing a specious "right to be born" when the actual right to life means access to the necessities of life - nutritious food, clean water, adequate shelter and medical care. Without these things life is constant anxiety and fear.
We have a politics, descended from the toxic Puritan strand of our history, that believes no one has a right to anything, and that is increasingly becoming our public policy.
Liberty I see as synonymous with self-rule - not to have an odious social order imposed on you against your will. This is always the most difficult as odious is in the eye of the beholder.
The pursuit of happiness requires a situation where an individual has the time and resources to pursue the goals they have, those which give their life meaning. This hits me hardest as a woman born in the 1950s - into a society that wanted to deny me self-realization, just as it had denied my mother, that wanted to condemn me to an odious future based on their idea of what a person with a vagina should not be permitted do, or was believed to be incapable of achieving.
I second the notion, Lyn. The preamble Simon quoted this morning speaks to it to. It was Jefferson I think that gets the credit for stringing these words together...
"establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty...
People are miserable and rightly so, but perhaps we should emphasize what has been stolen from the people, i.e. the vision elucidated in the preamble, (we could all use a little domestic tranquility these days) at least alongside the horrors of daily life for so many of our fellow Americans, and the burden we all feel.
We could be tagged as a big bag of downers otherwise... we get enough of that sh*t from the orange turd.
Ancient football joke:
“Emperor Franz Joseph, are you going to watch the Austria–Hungary game?”
“Yes, who are we playing?”
Oh, man, is it Happy Hour yet?
Surely it is, somewhere in the world. Perhaps you and I should pour ourselves drinks in solidarity?
Being of Eastern European extraction and of a certain age, and all that history you carry within your bones, has gotten to be so very exhausting in every conceivable way. I say that under the cover of this platform, because I am ashamed, for I know my elders were unimaginably exhausted, and if not for them and their courage, I wouldn't be here at all.
AWESOME news about the Post Office, but I do have a question. You wrote: "Talwani largely stopped the United States Postal Service (USPS) from refusing . . . ". "Largely" implies there's a little piece she didn't stop. Could you elaborate?
This is a great piece today. I think the politics of misery is accurate. Maybe misery and terror? But then we don’t want to be overly dramatic… but you are right to want to create a narrative that we can all tell with pith amd ease. It’s just horrible. I am feeling the Haitians and Syrians today. That’s the terror part.
Oh. Can you please comment on the reversal of the war powers resolution last night? Clown show doesn’t begin to describe them. WTF!
the terror is real. through my working years I had to be very careful where in the US I worked because there were inactive blue laws still on the books that said I could be sterilized due to my disability. a friend's son may die because of this. the attack on employment of disabled people means it's even harder to become employed and keep ourselves housed and fed. (and yeah, my "compassionate conservative" parents threw me out on the street back in the day when they got tired of my 6 seizures every single day. if you can't see that as terror, please just rethink it. it's different when its your lived experience.
thank you kathy. this is heartbreaking. I am praying you have gotten help for the seizures and are managing gracefully. thank you for letting us know. and yes. this is terror. and terrorizing.
Thanks for the update, Simon!
I called Congressman Raskin and Senators Alsobrooks and Van Hollen to say that if the Dept. of Defense needs more money, they should reverse the tax cuts on the billionaires. I also said that the president is out of touch with reality and needs to be removed from office. I'm working on postcards to Ohio voters today.
And the attempts at tyranny by the Loser and Convicted Felon and Sexual Abuser who is reported to have been a participant in the sexual abuse of a little 12 year old girl, has been stopped again by a Federal Judge with courage, ethics and knowledge of our Constitutional Protections and Guarantees! 25th Amendment. Trump is suffering from mental deterioration and is unfit to fulfill his duties. And who is Natalie, Donald? Does Melania have morning coffee with her, too? You are human scum, Trump.
Katie Phang is a Shero standing up for free speech and the Epstein abuse survivors. This is an important legal win for investigative journalism! This maga coverup will end, and the perps will be exposed and held accountable.
How many reasons does one person need to love Katie?
Love the new word that I will add to my vocabulary 'Shero'.
Riff away, Simon! Riff and write us into a better, brighter, saner, more virtuous future!
i stayed up to watch the game too. sorry i did. the usa has still not beaten any european team in the world cup except portugal in 2002. that's a real long time...felt bad for the fans who spent a fortune to watch the b team fail to close out a game. the usa teams have had an issue with this as long as i can remember, letting portugal tie in the last second in 2014 comes to mind. turner, weah, and pepi were all awful. but germany fielded their starters and also lost their final game to ecuador, which needed the win. my bil and niece scored tickets to that game and dazzled us with live photos, wearing their yellow colombia jerseys, they fit right in with ecuadoran fans. tbh, both games were epic, but you hate to be on the losing side. bosnia will be tough; this team eliminated italy from the world cup. i have two teams in this cup, colombia tomorrow which i think is already through. takes my mind off the scotus rulings this week; alito is clearly off his rocker and getting ready to retire imo. incredibly, my other team, italy, has missed the cup 3 times in a row now. not enough younger talent coming up. wife is going to italy in two weeks.
I was sorry to see this team not be the first to sweep all three games, but I wonder if this wasn't an ideal result. With so many key players only subbed on late or not at all (does Guler nutmeg Antonee Robinson or brush him off like he does to Berhalter? Would the US have had *two* midfielders & zero backs challenge Guler if they had more confidence in the backline players on the field? Does Chris Richard mark nobody in front of the goal?), it's not--or shouldn't be--a blow to their confidence, especially given that they had more possession (53-47%), more shots (18-9), more shots on goal (7-3), more touches in the box (36-22), more shots in the box (15-8), and more corners (9-2). But they're not going to be overconfident, they *are* going to be p*****, and I wouldn't want to be Bosnia. Respect for them on eliminating Italy, but when I look at their group games--would this team in this form draw with Canada? Lose to Switzerland 4-1? Beat Qatar only 3-1?
You really hit the nail on the head, I think, re: the players who really let down the side. Weah said as much about himself (said he was the one player who deserved to be subbed off), and for me, he was the most disappointing, because he's been so money for us--how could he not figure out to stop getting called offsides? how could he let the Turks keep muscling him off the ball? The two answers to those questions are probably related. In fairness, I wonder with Donovan whether he wouldn't have fared (a lot) better on the other side of the field--when I picture him at his best, I picture a falcon of a player remorselessly angling in towards goal from the *right.* Meanwhile, it was agony to watch Pepi blow chance after chance, and Turner came up small at least twice when they needed him to come up big.
It was at least an entertaining game, and great to see Pulisic in good health and looking hungry. No suspensions for the next game, and no A-team starters were hurt. (Hope Trusty is ok, showed a lot of guts). I think we are pretty well teed up for Wednesday, and a win there makes last night’s game a distant memory. Nice goal from Berhalter.
Yes, we need to start talking about the politics of misery today before we again get sucked into their trap of directing all the blame to Dems for the Republican messes we will have to spend years cleaning up - as was the case with Biden having to deal with COVID, inflation, etc.
And Obama cleaning up after Bush.
And Clinton after HW Bush; and Roosevelt after Hoover...it's an ongoing recycling of what happens in this country. Democrats get elected to clean up GOP messes, and then the American people forget and the GOP get elected again. Rinse and repeat. I'm so tired of this.
True, though FDR gave the master class in how to turn those lemons into sweet lemonade…
Yes, I hope we NEVER AGAIN take ownership of the problems they caused because we don't like to point fingers or think we don't need to because we can solve anything. That's noble, but until the electorate shows it has the motivation and capacity to understand this, it's going to continue to be literally a self-own. Love the "politics of misery," Simon!!! That's the *perfect* phrase to describe what they've done (misery) and why they've done it (politics)
Thanks for the quick link to your rules. If it had been there the time I posted a rather outlandish prediction and got kicked off commenting for a week, I might have saved that prediction for another forum (I wasn't completely wrong - comrade Krasnov actually did something even worse than whatever I was freaking about in these pages).
That said, I'm going to take a chance on appearing to "worry more and doing less" or at least "worrying more". Please bear with me. I am looking to find out that someone is already doing more about this worry than I had previously known, to find out what more I can do about said worry, and also to get Hopium readers to do more than whatever they've already been doing.
I read a lot about fears of Trump sending ICE to the polls and other efforts to suppress the vote. What I read next to nothing about is the possibility of electronic hacking of the voting and counting machines (Please forgive me if you've addressed this already, and please reply with a link to the article(s) - I have many Substack subscriptions and don't read every writer every day). The reason I'm concerned about that possibility is that such hacking is much cheaper, easier, less messy and more effective than any other method MAGA might use to mess with the midterms. In addition, evidence is finally coming to light that the 2024 election was hacked for Trump. Evidence is also coming to light that the recent wipeout of Thomas Massie in his primary by someone no one has ever heard of is the result of electronic vote manipulation. Trump and Musk have both made statements strongly implying that they rigged 2024.
So - what is being done to protect our midterms from electronic hacking, and how can I help? I already support www.electiontruthalliance.org, but their main focus is crunching numbers and documenting past "funny business".
The Senate Democrats started an election protection task force to game out all the different scenarios for attacking our elections leading up to the November midterms. I don’t know if they have gamed out the hacking scenario, but maybe try contacting the offices of the senators who are on the task force?
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/as-trump-admin-and-republicans-escalate-attacks-on-free_fair-electionsand-foreign-threats-growsenate-democrats-launch-earliest--largest-election-protection-effort-in-history
They really need to game out the hacking scenario. See e.g. https://substack.com/@thiswillhold I don't know that these guys are right about *2024*, but they're the first folks I've seen who've done an analysis that provides a real evidence-based answer to why the exit polls in *2004* that showed Kerry was going to win the popular vote and the official results differed (specifically, their analysis shows that in places where right-wing companies produced the voting machines being used, there was a fairly consistent rightward shift in results from 2000 to 2004; whereas in places where other machines were in use--mainly in *Republican* areas like the Great Plains and Mountain West--the leftward shift predicted by the exit polls shows up clearly and consistently).
By contrast, neither the completely tautological official report (which claimed: we know the exit polls were wrong because they didn't agree with the official result, and: we know they were wrong because the exits *did* agree with the official results in 2002 and 2006, but not in 2004) nor the psychographic categories made up for the occasion, i.e. the "shy Republicans" who supposedly didn't want to tell exit pollsters who they voted for (which Pew, in 2021, finally pronounced null and void) provide any evidence-based explanation at al (if you're interested, here's more analysis that imnsho eviscerates its successor, "the shy Trump voter" [ https://creativepoli.net/shy_trumpers ] as well as the theory, advanced by certain Democratic politcal consultants, that by attacking the "fake news media" polls, Trump himself discouraged his supporters from responding [ https://creativepoli.net/trump_polls ]).
In desperation, the corporate media even laughably claimed that the exit poll "error" was caused by a "late surge of Republican voters" after the exits were complete--have you *ever* seen a long line of voters at a *Republican* polling place *anywhere* in the last hour it was open? :D. Let alone across the country? And in the end, while the Ukrainians were rising up in in the wake of a similar discrepancy, the media & pollsters agreed never to show the top line (overall) result of exit polls to the public again--you know, so we don't worry our pretty little heads over whether our elections are on the up and up.
In addition to suspicious statements made by Trump and Musk Tracey cites (as well as statements NOT made--eg Trump and Johnson promised to reveal, after the election, the allegedly completely legal tactic Trump was referring to when he said two weeks before the election he had "a secret" that "guaranteed" he'd win--a revelation we're still waiting to hear), there was this curious statement made by a Putin spokesman a few days after the election: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." And the hits keep coming--when Johnson was asked recently about evidence for GOP claims that the LA mayoral election was rigged, he said something to the effect that "sometimes vote changing takes place so far upstream that you can't detect it." Gee, Mike, and how do you know that?
It's possible, of course, that such remarks are merely intended to pysch our voters out of showing up--in the past, the Russians, in particular, have been quite blatant about this, e.g. in 2020, their notorious Internet Research Agency stated that "Soon after November 6, you will realize that your vote means nothing. We decide who you vote for and what candidates will win or lose. Whether you vote or not, there is no difference as we control the voting and counting systems. Remember, your vote has zero value. We are choosing for you.” Which, of course, turned out not to be the case.
And I agree 110% with Simon that our best defense against *any* of this is for as many of us as possible to vote early in person, and get as much media attention as possible on the lines in our polling locations throughout the entire voting period. If the corporate media won't give that story the attention it deserves (like they've never given No Kings, nor have they ever reported accurately on it), we should recognize that they aren't the gatekeepers any more, and that we collectively have more reach and more credibility than they do, and take and share as many videos of what's going on as possible.
But it would be good to know there's a Plan B.
I recommend anyone interested in grassroots plans being made to protect our elections to yesterday’s What’s the Plan with Indivisible co-founders Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS73jRQ3qBiUf_C76Z1qoR4rAiGGoxTcT&si=-jg0NzmcyfiiyQPS
They are joined by Corey Dukes from Protect Democracy.
https://protectdemocracy.org/how-you-can-protect-democracy/
Lots of ways to get involved to safeguard our elections are discussed and audience questions addressed.
Finally, watch this space for future events/actions: https://indivisible.org/campaigns/our-vote/
Politics of Misery seems to describe perfectly the GOP strategy.
I would add Politics of Misery and Decimation.
Our very own American Caligula: callous, cruel, and corrupt.
And to the white evangelicals who continue unwavering support of Trump : you have turned American Christian into an oxymoron.
Hooray for Talerico presenting Christianity in a different light, and reflecting more accurately the teaching of Jesus.
At least to my knowledge, 47 does not have a favorite horse.
“More for us, misery for you”
Might you consider calling it the politics of cruelty?
The people of OH and FL voted for this administration, perhaps without any recognition of the cruelty that would be bestowed on their neighbors. The myopic view of way too many Americans is infuriating.
Congress needs to get its act together on immigration and other matters. It became obvious to me in law school, nearly 40 years ago, that far too much governing is ceded to an unelected judiciary and a term limited executive. So, yes, the TPS ruling is cruel and undoubtedly rooted in racism, but the proper branch to lead on the issue is the Congress.
It’s both the politics of cruelty AND misery. The MAGA agenda is cruel - the point is to inflict misery.
Thanks for your continued leadership and optimism, Simon. I think this recent speech by Tom Hanks at Harvard's graduation speaks directly to building a narrative around the values expressed in our Constitution and our responsibility to foster them. He rambles a bit, but has some really good things to say: https://youtu.be/lVga4CX6kXA?si=wulpJigMI_TrlSWj
Allow me to suggest that what we need is : a politics of happiness
The World Happiness Index has attempted to quantify national satisfaction with their country as rated by the people themselves along various criteria. Our so-called "greatest country" is not even in the top 20. In fact, over the years I've paid attention to this we keep sliding down the rankings.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-20-world-happiness-report-2025-shows-people-are-much-kinder-we-expect
The founding document that we are celebrating this year, that pronounces the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has not been the lodestar of policy, and becomes less so.
The "right to life" has been hijacked by religious zealots obsessed with controlling everyone's sex life, attributing a specious "right to be born" when the actual right to life means access to the necessities of life - nutritious food, clean water, adequate shelter and medical care. Without these things life is constant anxiety and fear.
We have a politics, descended from the toxic Puritan strand of our history, that believes no one has a right to anything, and that is increasingly becoming our public policy.
Liberty I see as synonymous with self-rule - not to have an odious social order imposed on you against your will. This is always the most difficult as odious is in the eye of the beholder.
The pursuit of happiness requires a situation where an individual has the time and resources to pursue the goals they have, those which give their life meaning. This hits me hardest as a woman born in the 1950s - into a society that wanted to deny me self-realization, just as it had denied my mother, that wanted to condemn me to an odious future based on their idea of what a person with a vagina should not be permitted do, or was believed to be incapable of achieving.
I second the notion, Lyn. The preamble Simon quoted this morning speaks to it to. It was Jefferson I think that gets the credit for stringing these words together...
"establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty...
People are miserable and rightly so, but perhaps we should emphasize what has been stolen from the people, i.e. the vision elucidated in the preamble, (we could all use a little domestic tranquility these days) at least alongside the horrors of daily life for so many of our fellow Americans, and the burden we all feel.
We could be tagged as a big bag of downers otherwise... we get enough of that sh*t from the orange turd.