by William Skink
I finished the following video a few days before the inauguration, but didn’t get a chance to upload it until tonight. There is some cool aerial footage I used of Missoula, including an interesting shadow on the field of the home of the Griz. Enjoy!
By JC
In Barack Obama’s outgoing press conference on Wednesday, he admitted that the emails that were purportedly hacked and released via the Russians were in fact leaked:
First of all, I haven’t commented on WikiLeaks, generally. The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wikileaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC emails that were leaked.
So, after months of wailing by the liberal press and those who couldn’t believe that Hillary Clinton could lose on her own (of course with help from the DNC), the largest non-news event of the day basically admits that it was all just smoke and mirrors.
With the coronation of Donald Trump now captivating the news cycle, it will be left imprinted in people’s brains that the Russians hacked the election, and gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks and thus took down Clinton. Thus propaganda has done its work.
Will the admission of soon-to-be-ex president Obama that the emails were leaked — and the evidence of hacking was inconclusive — ever see the light of day in the same press rooms that were so adamant it was the Russians? I doubt it. And we will be left with a public image of an election tarnished by foreign influence, when in fact that election of Trump was only assisted by actions of an insider leaking the emails and thus the facts behind the scene of Hillary’s campaign.
h/t to b at Moon over Alabama for having the temerity to wade through Obama’s remarks to sift out this beauty.
by William Skink
Women will be marching on Helena this weekend, and men are welcome to join them, as this post at ID implores us men to do, but I won’t be joining the march for a variety of reasons.
Before getting to that, let me say I support women’s rights. I don’t intend to diminish the perception of increased threat women are experiencing after the legitimate election of Donald Trump.
One of the reasons I refuse to participate in this march is because Donald Trump’s rise to power was directly enabled by the narrowly defined, gender-centric identity campaign Hillary and her supporters waged.
Substantive criticism of Hillary was immediately dismissed as sexist. Men who chose to support Bernie were labeled by a coordinated smear campaign as Bernie Bros. Privileged white women even turned on other women who dared to consider alternatives to supporting Hillary.
And now, tomorrow, the consequence of prioritizing a symbolic token victory for womenkind is being fully realized. Yet instead of reflecting on the failed strategy of identity politics, the boogeyman Vlad is scapegoated as the male villain responsible for destroying poor Hillary’s coronation, along with all those angry sexist men–like me, obviously–who refused to vote for her.
My political reasoning for not attending this march is rhetorical, but the real reason I’m not going is practical. The logistics of a road trip with two boys, a baby and a puppy just to register my disdain at an incoming president those at the rally had an unacknowledged role in electing is not how I want to spend a Saturday.
You might be surprised to hear me, a man, talk about family. According to the stated opinion of a Missoula City Councilperson articulated in last week’s Indy, men just aren’t as “geared toward family” as women are:
In the dwindling light of a December evening, a woman pushed a blanket-covered stroller along the narrow, icy shoulder of Russell Street. Councilwoman Emily Bentley, driving to the gym, noticed her. Bentley could see the woman wasn’t wearing gloves. She had probably just gotten off a bus.
Bentley says that woman comes to mind when she sits in Council chambers, debating issues of infrastructure and housing. She wonders if the stranger’s image resonates so acutely because Bentley herself has two kids at home.
“Women see things differently,” Bentley says. “Well, I’m not a man, so I don’t know if I see things differently from men, but I feel like my perspective is much more geared toward families. I’m a young mother, so that’s what my perspective is.”
I wonder if Bentley would say the same thing about the young mother I called Child Protective Services on because of the condition of the apartment I found her baby in. I’m talking pills on the table, drug paraphernalia, urine soaked carpet, trash everywhere and “adults” so debilitated they didn’t notice the baby crawling out an open door to the 3rd floor walkway.
And then I think of my friend who is a single dad raising two girls with barely any support from his partner. The offensive gender-stereotyping Bentley is asserting certainly doesn’t hold true in his situation.
I know lots of women probably feel cheated out of dancing on the shards of the glass ceiling they expected Hillary to shatter. The most glaring problem, at least for me, is the cost many of these women were willing to accept in order to achieve this milestone.
The cost includes worsening the lives of women in Honduras, women in Libya, women on welfare, women who birth super predator sons and women sexually abused by Hillary’s husband.
For those who show up in Helena on Saturday, I hope the march is cathartic and empowering. I also hope you don’t dismiss my perspective because I was born with a penis and abstained from voting for a sociopath (the one with the vagina, not the little cock).
by William Skink
I foresee record alcohol sales during the next 72 hours.
by William Skink
As Democrats try feebly to rally their dejected rank and file into action (and donating dontchyaknow) a recent post at Moogirl caught my attention. The post itself–a snark-fest of predictable derision targeting Trump–suggests adopting the enemy’s tactics is mission critical in this dire fight for core liberal principals. Here is how Justin Robbins ends his “defense of the unconventional“:
Grounded in the same liberal principles which underlie the original American experiment, I will plant myself firmly in the face of any who would use this clown’s election as carte blanche to lash out at minorities, assault women, foment racism, or otherwise advance ignorance. It is not a time for good people to do nothing and if this pig’s chosen arena is the mud, I don’t mind getting dirty.
One comment on this post stood out, and it comes from Mark Anderlik, president of the Missoula Area Central Labor Council:
I asked myself “what is missing?” in this rather snarky piece. And it came to me that the author seems to believe everything was okay before the election of Trump. Neoliberal elites have failed the American people, as the Trump fascists will also inevitably do. Rejecting both political ideologies and replacing them with some kind of democratic socialism is what remains. And it begins with understanding what the 99% need.
We could also begin with what we don’t need: more obscene wealth pooling into fewer and fewer hands, like the 8 wealthiest men owning the same chunk of change as the poorest half of the global population, or 3.6 billion people.
But that’s not where we are. Nope, instead we have half the electorate thinking the wealthiest cabinet in history is going to be responsive to their needs while the other half is quadrupling down on Putin did it.
Yesterday–Martin Luther King day–the political outrage burned over one of Trump’s most audaciously bullshit tweets claiming Rep. John Lewis is all talk and no action. While that political firestorm erupted, it wasn’t until today that I heard what John Lewis actually said, which is this:
“I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president,” Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, told NBC News’ Chuck Todd in a clip released Friday. “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”
This comment is getting virtually no scrutiny, but it deserves some attention because it sparked this latest micro-drama in the kabuki theater our political stage has become.
First, an elected representative contesting the legitimacy of an incoming president is a big deal. If I was an elected representative preparing to publicly denounce an incoming president, I would be sure to use the best argument available to back it up. The impending Trump presidency offers a plethora of angles one could use to claim illegitimacy, like financial entanglements and a recent legal settlement for 25 million dollars awarded to the victims of the Trump University scam.
But those weren’t the arguments Rep. Lewis used. Instead it was “…the Russians participated in helping this man get elected.”
And why did Lewis use this angle to attack Trump? Because the Putin angle is a multi-functional attack that smears Trump while simultaneously providing cover for Hillary Clinton’s monumental failure to win the election.
The saddest part of this latest incremental step toward enacting a soft coup against Trump is the fact John Lewis offered up the credibility he bled for during the 60’s in order to provide cover for a soulless political machine built by the Clintons–a machine that steamrolled African American communities during the 90’s with tough-on-crime mandatory minimums, a racist drug war, free trade agreements and new holes in the social safety net with welfare reform.
John Lewis–and every desperate Democrat clinging to the false narrative that Putin cost Hillary Clinton the election–need a better strategy for deposing Trump from the White House. Resurrecting the Cold War to delegitimize Trump is not just idiotically short-sighted, it’s insanely dangerous.
To emphasize that point, imagine if this article was about Russia building up troops in Mexico:
About 1,000 of a promised 4,000 troops arrived in Poland at the start of the week, and a formal ceremony to welcome them is to be held on Saturday. Some people waved and held up American flags as the troops, tanks and heavy armoured vehicles crossed into south-western Poland from Germany, according to Associated Press.
But their arrival was not universally applauded. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We perceive it as a threat. These actions threaten our interests, our security. Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s [the US], not even a European state.”
How far is this going to go? And what are Democrats willing to risk to destroy Trump?