https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=
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There is more breaking news from Canada regarding the flood of American Liberals seeking shelter from Donald. and the fact that America will soon become an ecological disaster as coal miners are allowed to work, fracking returns, we become energy independent and NRA members shoot everything in sight.
Worst of all. American Universities, particularly The Ivy League, are being emptied of students fleeing North carrying their cry blankets and led by by political science professors in tears.
Furthermore, America is being emptied of its entire entertainment industry and home prices in Hollywood and Silicon Valley are crashing. Favorite TV shows and sit-coms have been canceled and many of the most Liberal Mass Media Companies are fearing bankruptcy. Even the Gray Lady's Publisher wrote a mea culpa op ed pleading with its readership not to cancel their subscriptions.
Rioters are continuing to protest the new president elect and, to show their disgust, they are reminding us that "Black Lives Matter" but "Lives of Police Do Not Matter."
President Obama is sooo concerned he canceled his round of golf and is heading to Europe for his last hurrah.
Finally, Hillary asked MSNBC for air time so she can explain why she ran the type of campaign she did in the hope that she can mend her fractured party but Pocahontas Warren and Bernie objected so she will speak to the nation from Saudi Arabia where a coalition of Clinton Foundation Donors have agreed to host her.
Meanwhile, Trumpers are meeting with Donald and are seeking ways to "Make America Great Again" but they are meeting resistance from all those D.C gators.
Frankly, I believe the Far Left is reacting to their own echo and will miss participating in the opportunities Trump has if the Republican Congress supports him.
Obama is leaving a plate full of crap for his successor. Consequently, Trump's options are limited when it comes to how much and on what he can spend to get the unemployed re-employed, rebuild our military and infrastructure all the while simplifying the tax code commensurate with reducing taxes and repairing our health care system. - all in 100 days and/or at least make a big down payment on accomplishing his agenda.
A good bit of the legislation is already written and has been drawing dust on Reid's shelf so that might speed the process.
There are a multiple number of cross current winds such as The Fed's desire to raise interest rates, why will corporations spend repatriated funds when there is little demand, even if factories are built technology and robots will reduce levels of historical employment and will our adversaries stand still while we recover from 8 years of Obama's misguided leadership?
At least for the first time in 8 years I am hopeful and positioning myself to be positive. Once again, time will tell whether I should.
Market wise I still like: KKR and BX for the long term. Am cutting back in BAC though I believe it has more to go. I became too heavy in it as it sank and now can take some gains to place elsewhere. BMY has gone beyond an entry point and I am sure current enthusiasm will taper..
Market wise I still like: KKR and BX for the long term. Am cutting back in BAC though I believe it has more to go. I became too heavy in it as it sank and now can take some gains to place elsewhere. BMY has gone beyond an entry point and I am sure current enthusiasm will taper..
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This from the sister of a friend and fellow memo reader: "It feels so good to be able to read thoughtful, intelligent and cohesive comments from people who actually think about issues, versus those who repeat phrases they have been told to say - yet unable to define why they supported distrustful ruthless politicians.
I'm amused by the happenings of late where schools are bringing in grief counselors, where millennials are calling their mommies crying about the results of the election and where these poor losers cannot understand "how this happened!!" They need to start looking in their mirrors and in their hearts for the reasons.
I love the list below depicting how we got here... they created us. Ironic isn't it?
The liberal media ultimately shot themselves in the foot by declaring that their "queen" was going to win - that she should start measuring the drapes of the White House (like she didn't already know the measurements!!)... I believe the media caused their blind-faith believers to stay home - some of them may already be on the road to Canada.
It's very hard not to "go there" and snicker and say "I told you so!," but I will refrain from being "too happy" in public - because they aren't able to accept us who can have cogent, intelligent conversations who MAY make them think and use logic.
And although I'd like to shout from our rooftop that American will once again rise to where it once was, and maybe even higher, I will take the high road and continue working hard, earning a paycheck, paying my way-too-high business taxes, and enjoying our freedoms.
I have regained my faith in this great country and I cannot be happier with the results of this election!!
C----
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This is from a very dear friend, neighbor and fellow memo reader who received this from a French friend.I am posting it because I believe Moyer is wrong. He expresses the feelings of many of my liberal friends, those tearing up towns in protest, and students who are in shock, need therapy and dog licks to regain their composure and who are too focused on both the characterization of Trump by his detractors and Donald's own boorishness rather than what will be accomplished because we finally have a Congress able to implement changes we need and which have been bottled up by Reid etc.
I find it interesting that Moyer ignores writing about Hillary, her contempt for half of those "deplorables" for Trump, the fact that Obama came into office with control of The House and Senate. and what Hillary's election would have said about The Rule of Law, personal ethics etc..
Frankly, Moyer more or less died and became insignificant when President Johnson left office. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1)BREAKING NEWS FROM
CANADA
The flood of Trump-fearing American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week. The Republican presidential campaign is prompting an exodus among left-leaning Americans who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, pay taxes, and live according to the Constitution.
Canadian border residents say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, liberal arts majors, global-warming activists, and “green” energy proponents crossing their fields at night.
“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said southern Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. “He was cold, exhausted and hungry, and begged me for a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just stuck their fingers in their ears and kept coming. Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals just south of the border, pack them into electric cars, and drive them across the border, where they are simply left to fend for themselves after the battery dies.
“A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,” an Alberta border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier water, or any gemelli with shrimp and arugula. All they had was a nice little Napa Valley cabernet and some kale chips. When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing that they fear persecution from Trump high-hairers.
Rumors are circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer, study the Constitution, and find jobs that actually contribute to the economy.
In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in blue-hair wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the ’50s.
“If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age,” an official said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage, are buying up all the Barbara Streisand CD’s, and are overloading the internet while downloading jazzercise apps to their cell phones.
“I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “After all, how many art-history majors does one country need?
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2)You may wish to read this (yes, it is gut-wrenching but in a different sense). Sent from a liberal acquaintance in Paris. Looks to me like Bill Moyers has lost it totally and fans the flames of rebellion. D---
Subject: Farewell, America - BillMoyers
America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.
Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
I hunt for that affirming flame.
This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.
If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.
No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things.
The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.
Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.
The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.
Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived.
Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.
With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.
What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.
This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern
Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.
For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.
But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
2a) THE OBAMA ERA IS OVER
By Daniel Greenfield
Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an inevitable arc that bent their way.
The tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America. We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national future.
The past was gone. We were falling into the gorgeous wonderful future of dot com instant deliveries and outsourced everything. We would become more tolerant and guilty. The future was Amazon and Disney. It was hot and cold running social justice. The Bill of Rights was done. Ending the First and Second Amendments was just a clever campaign away. Narratives on news sites drove everything.
Presidents were elected by Saturday Night Live skits. John Oliver, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee were our journalists. Safe spaces were everywhere and you better watch your microaggressions, buddy. No more coal would be mined. No more anything would be made. The end of men was here. The end of the dead white men of the literary canon. The end of white people. The end of binary gender and marriage. The end of reason. The end of art. The end of 2 + 2 equaling 4. This was Common Core time. It was time to pardon an endless line of drug dealers. To kill cops and praise criminals. To be forced to buy worthless health insurance for wealth redistribution to those who voted their way to wealth.
This was Obama's America. And there was no going back. We were rushing through endless goal posts of social transformation. The military fell. Then the police. Now it looks as quaint as anything from the 50s, the 70s or the 80s. A brief moment of foolishness that already appears odd and awkward. And then one day nostalgic. It wasn't the future. It's already the past. It's history.
Scalia died. Hillary Clinton was bound to win. And she would define the Supreme Court. Down ticket races would give her a friendly Senate. And then perhaps the House.
But there is no right side of history. There is only the side we choose.
The Obama era was permanent. It was history. Now it is history.
Its shocking ascendancy has been paired with an equally shocking descent. The Obama era is done. It's gone. It's over. It was wiped from the pages of history in one night that left Congress and the White House in Republican hands.
It would have been bad enough if Jeb Bush had succeeded Obama. That would have been inconvenient, but not a repudiation. Instead Obama's legacy was dashed to pieces. His frantic efforts to campaign for Hillary did no good. The public did not vocally reject him. What they did was in its own way even worse. They brushed past him. They sidelined him. They gave him passable approval ratings while dismissing his biggest accomplishments. They forgot him. They made it clear that he did not matter.
And that is in its own way far more brutal and wounding. They didn't just destroy the Obama era. Instead they dismissed it as if it never existed.
Obama didn't make history after all. He wasn't a teleprompter demi-god standing athwart of history. He was Carter and Ford. He was there to be forgotten. He didn't change the world. He wasn't the messiah. He was merely mortal. Just another politician who will sag and age. Who will, in the end, be photographed like Bill Clinton, lonely and lost in a world that has passed him by.
The Obama era ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a national consensus that maybe he didn't really matter so much after all. And those to whom he mattered the most were his enemies determined to undo everything he did.
Obama once thought that he belonged to the ages. Now he belongs in the rubbish bin.
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