Daily Archives: March 4, 2017

The photograph that started the gleefully stupid This is the future that liberals want meme.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BOUBAH360 / INSTAGRAM

In 1999, John Rocker, a beefy young relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, explained toSports Illustratedwhy hednever want to play baseball in New York. Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like youre [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids, he said. Its depressing. Thetabloids raged, local politicians condemned the remarks, and Major League Baseball suspended him for the first few months of the coming season. Rockers comments spurred New Yorkers to do a rare thing: praise the subway, in this case, the 7 train, with its especially diverse ridership, holding it up as an emblem of city pride.

This week, the New York subway featured in a similar skirmish in the culture wars, when a Twitter userre-posted a photographof a drag queen sitting on the train next to a woman in a niqab, with the caption, This is the future that liberals want. As with Rockers comments, the framing of a subway tableau as some kind of debased and terrifying dystopia was met with widespread derision. Part of the response was urgent and earnestanother assertion of cosmopolitan values during a time of ascendant reactionary politics. Twitter users pointed out that the sight of two very different-looking people riding the train was neither remarkable nor futuristicsuch things happen every day, right now. BuzzFeed tracked down Gilda Wabbit, the drag queen in the photo,who said, I wont speak for all liberals, but my goal is for everyone . . . to be able to exist as they choose without judgment or fear.

Mostly, though, liberals just laughed, and, for arare moment in the era of President Trump, they laughed at themselvesappropriating the offending tweet as a self-reflexive meme that mocked the original poster and liberal culture in equal measure. Users posted an array of photosPower Rangers, Care Bears, the animated eco-warriors of Captain Planet, the Young Pope, all manner of cute animals, Justin Trudeauas other visions of the long dreamed-of progressive future. As the meme spread, it devolved into near meaningless: people are now posting photos of just about anything with the phrase attached. It has become the first Thanks, Obama or Benghazi joke of the Trump eraan ironic repurposing of conservative outrage that is defused and made ridiculous.

The threats posed by Trumpism, of course, are seriousand one of Trumpisms central themes is an ever-narrowing conception of what it means to be an American, what it means to belong, who gets to be counted as us and who as other. To this end, the original tweet is exactly the kind of thing that deserves serious refutation. But one of the offshoots of the rise of Trump has been to rob many liberals of their sense of humor. To pay close attention to the news is to trap oneself in a daily cycle of outrage, self-righteousness, a pained recognition of the inelegance of that self-righteousness, and, finally, a feeling of futility. Part of what made the Womens March so powerful was its scenes of comedy, not simply the signs that mocked the President, but those that recognized the joyousness in the very of act of protest.

A classic strategy of the school bully is to make his enemies look, in comparison, like uptight weenies. Every time that Trump rages about fake news, people are compelled to respond with some form of, No, actually, reporting is real, and facts are important and essential to the functioning of democracy. Its a necessary response, but, on style points, the class clown always beats the teachers pet.

Sometimes, the nonsense campaign of Trump and his most fervent supporters must be recognized as such and ignored, or else, as in this case, mocked and hijacked in a new and better direction. This is the future that liberals want was a stupid thing to say, and the meme it spawned is stupid, toobut its a gleeful, exuberant kind of stupidity, and, in a small way, it has provided a moment of release. Constant vigilant outrage is not only exhausting, and eventually deflating, but its ill suited to liberal culture, which is suffused with a healthy dose of self-awareness, self-mockery, and even self-loathing. Theres a reason why conservatives control talk radio, with all its grim certitude, and liberals run comedy, which is characterized by, among others things, ambivalence. As Woody Allen, in Annie Hall, said, Dont you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like were left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is said to find nothing about himself funny at all. That, as much as anything else, is worth resisting.

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This Is the Future That Liberals Want Is the Joke That Liberals Need - The New Yorker

Juan Thompson, the St. Louis native arrested for making bomb threats against Jewish centers, used to writeatleft-wing websiteThe Intercept before being fired for fabrication.

Heres Mediaites report on his firing a year ago.

News website The Interceptissued a mass retraction and correction Tuesday after admitting that one of their writers regularly fabricated sources and impersonated sources with fake Gmail accounts.

An investigation into [Juan Thompson]s reporting turned up three instances in which quotes were attributed to people who said they had not been interviewed. In other instances, quotes were attributed to individuals we could not reach, who could not remember speaking with him, or whose identities could not be confirmed, Editor-in-chiefBetsy Reed announced in a note to readers.

The authorities have not come out and said the two Juan Thompsons are the same, but tweets from the former journalist makes it clear they are. The FBI alleges Thompsonmade the threats in an attempt to frame his ex-girlfriend, while Thompsons tweets suggest the same.

In addition, an article filed shortly after Thompsons firingindicated he was from St. Louis.

UPDATE (11:11 AM ET): The Intercept confirmed in a statement that Thompson is a former employee, and denounced his actions.

[Image via screengrab]

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Man Arrested For JCC Bomb Threats Was Liberal Journalist Fired For Fabrication - Mediaite

I am a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts and would have voted for George McGovern for president in 1972 if I hadnt been 12 years old at the time. I have never voted for a Republican in my life and most certainly didn't start this past November. I have very little respect for Donald Trump as a businessman and even less for him as a politician. I remain positively mystified about how enough of my fellow Americans in the right combination of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin could have voted for a man so temperamentally and intellectually ill-suited for the job of president of the United States.

But and it pains me to write this as wrongheaded as I think Trump has been about nearly everything he has done in his first five weeks in the Oval Office, there is one huge thing he has been right about: Wall Street.

He is absolutely correct to seek to change the onerous financial regulations that have reigned down on both the big Wall Street banks and the smaller, more local banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. And it is on this foundational, fundamental issue that my like-minded liberals are dead wrong.

Theyd like to impose more regulations on Wall Street. Big mistake. Theyd like to break up the big Wall Street banks, and had even introduced legislation is recent years to do just and that would even more wrong. They have argued that anyone who has ever worked on Wall Street should not be allowed to work in Washington mind-boggling pigheaded and downright discriminatory.

Liberals find every aspect of Trumps policy repugnant, and I get that. He is repugnant. But he is largely right about how to reform finance and Wall Street, whether most liberals care to admit that or not.

Weve got to have a fact-based understanding of what Wall Street is and what it does. Think of it and banks generally as the magnificent engine of capitalism, taking money from people who want to save it or to invest it bank depositors and allocating it at a competitive price to those who want it or need it to start, to grow, or to nurture businesses around the world, and that provide so many of us the jobs and the incomes we need and want to live better, more fulfilling lives. It is the envy of the world, and one that has made the United States the dominant economic power in the past century.

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen developed the famous "jobs to be done" theory to explain consumer behavior. He talked to MarketWatch about how his jobs-to-be-done theory can also explain Donald Trump's rise to power.

You may think the banks are evil, but I bet you like your iPhone. You probably like your mortgage, your 401(k), your car, your widescreen TV and Facebook too. If you do, you like what Wall Street does, and you should want it to succeed.

But in the wake of the financial crisis, Washington politicians and regulators threw sand into the gears of the beautiful machine. It was an understandable populist reaction to the real pain and suffering that Wall Street, in large part, had caused the American people by packaging up shoddy mortgages and then selling them off around the world as AAA-rated investments, even though many bankers knew that they werent. That was wrong.

That bad behavior should have been prosecuted by Eric Holders Justice Department, but it wasnt, not in a way that gave a measure of satisfaction to the American people that bad behavior wouldn't go unpunished. We needed accountability for the wrongdoing that bankers and traders perpetrated but instead we got market-crushing bureaucracy designed to turn banks into utilities.

But, of course, banks are not utilities, and shouldnt be treated or regulated as ones. Supplying capital to those who want it is not the same as supplying electricity. Banks need to take risks hopefully prudent ones in order to nurture the next Apple, Google, Microsoft or General Electric when they come along. Reducing overly burdensome regulations on banks will get them lending again to the next batch of American companies that have the potential to change the world. Rewarding bankers, traders and executives to take smart risks, while punishing them when they mess up, will also help our economy grow quickly.

Trump is right that there should be an intelligent, well-considered reform of the onerous provisions of the rules and regulations imposed on banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The Dodd-Frank law, passed in 2010 to re-regulate banks, runs to more than 800 pages and is nearly opaque. More than additional 20,000 pages of rules and regulations have followed in its wake. Most people are clueless about what this mountain of paper requires banks to do. Some of it that which requires higher capital requirements for big banks, less leverage, that derivatives to be traded on exchanges, even the much-maligned Consumer Protection Financial Bureau is worthwhile and should be retained. But much of the law, and its various still-unfulfilled mandates, should be tossed out.

Investors in the equity markets seem to be heartened euphoric even about the overhaul of financial regulation that Trump has promised. Since his unexpected election victory, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared, and is now past 21,000, after being stuck around 17,500 for the last years of the Obama administration. More than $2.5 trillion of paper wealth has been created for people invested in the U.S. stock markets.

Whether the upward movement in stocks can be sustained remains to be seen, of course, but at least in this one isolated but highly important aspect reducing regulation on Wall Street the otherwise utterly irresponsible Trump administration is onto something.

Now read: Rex Nutting says Donald Trump and Gary Cohn are wrong in their claims about Dodd-Frank killing the economy

William Cohan is the author of Why Wall Street Matters, published on Feb. 28. Follow him on Twitter @WilliamCohan

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This liberal painfully admits where Donald Trump is getting it right ... - MarketWatch

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Boubah Barry

Samuel Themer never planned to be a symbol of everything thats right or wrong with America. He just wanted to go to work. But when he hopped on the subwayto head into Manhattan on February 19, the Queens resident was in full draghe performs as Gilda Wabbit. He also ended up sittingnext to a woman in a niqab, a fact he initially didnt even notice. I was just sitting on the train, existing, he says. It didnt seem out of the ordinary that a woman in full modesty garb would sit next to me.

Someone on that W car with them, though, thought otherwise.Boubah Barry, aGuinean immigrant and real estate student, wanted to document what he saw as a testament to tolerance, so he took a photo of the pair andpostedit to Instagram. Its diversity, says Barry, who says he doesnt identify as liberal or conservative but does oppose President Trumps refugee ban. They sit next to each other, and no one cares.

But someone did care. After the post was shared by Instagram account subwaycreatures, the photo driftedacross the internet until /pol/ News Network attached it to a tweet on Wednesday with the message This is the future that liberals want.

/pol/ News Network, which also recently declaredGet Outto be anti-white propaganda,probably intended the post to be a warning about the impending liberal dystopia. But as soon as actual liberals saw it, they flipped the message on its headand began touting the message as exactly the future they wanted. They filled /pol/ News Networks mentions with messages endorsing the photo and adding their own visions of a bright future. By Thursday, it was a full-blown meme. Soon images of a future filled with interspecies companionship, gay space communism, and Garfield flooded onto social media.

As one of the people at the center of the meme, Themer is happy to be a symbol of the far-rightsfear of an inclusive futureand part of the online communitys response to it. I absolutely believe its the future I want, says Themer. I want it to not be a big deal that we sat next to each other, were just being ourselves.

But he also recognizes the danger of using a meme to reinforce an echo chamber, no matter the political bent. The perspectives that are being illustrated by this imageit worries me that the divide is so deep, he says. I dont like when its used just as simple confirmation bias. When two groups use the same image to prove their critiques of the other, it fosters prejudice, rather than conversation. Themer would rather the image prompt a dialogue across the political chasm and get people to see themselves in Barrys photo.

If we can come to have empathy for each other, we can come to a place where we can find common ground and move forward, he says. Thats the goal.

The backlash against the /pol/ News Networks post is a rare display ofa memesredemptive powerits abilityto flip a bigoted statement into one of optimism. Liberal voices have co-opted the image as a way to create a utopian vision lit by the rosy glow of President Beyonc, Never Nude Syndrome, and lots of dogs.

But empathy? Thats a tall order for the internet in 2017. Still, if an opera-singing drag queen from Kentucky, a woman in a niqab, and a Guinean immigrant can come together and coexist peacefully on the W train, it just might be possible for the rest of us.

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The Story Behind That 'Future That Liberals Want' Photo - WIRED

Support for Justin Trudeau's Liberals has sharply declined over the last three months, dropping to its lowest levels since thelast federal election.

The party has taken a hitin the polls in every region of the country, boosting both the Conservatives and New Democrats as a result. But despite the governing party's worsening fortunes, the Liberals still have as much support today as they did when they secured a majority government in October 2015.

The Liberals have averaged 40.5 per cent support in national polls conducted over the last three months, a drop of 6.8 points compared to the previous quarter. Though that is still above their electoral result of 39.5 per cent, it is a significant shift from the party's steady pollingat 46 to 47 per cent throughout 2016.

This is, by a wide margin, the greatest shift recorded in national voting intentions since Liberal support surged in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 election. This shift has all but erased those "honeymoon" gains.

Thenegative trend coincided with a number of issues that may have sapped Liberal strength, including the government's pipeline decisions, its broken electoral reform promise, the prime minister's cash-for-access controversies and his stay on the Aga Khan's private island in the Bahamas.

(Note that past quarterly averages have been revised due to the inclusion of polling data from Nanos Research that had not been available at the time.)

The Conservatives have picked up 3.5 points in the past quarter, boosting the party to 31.8 per cent nearly identical to the Tories' electoral performance. This is another important shift, as the Conservatives had previously been stagnating under 30 per cent after losing power.

The New Democrats were also up, gaining 2.3 points to hit 15.6 per cent support. That is still down almost four points from their election showing in 2015, support the party has been unable to claw back from the Liberals.

In fact, the NDP's weakness would give the Liberals the potential to win more seats than they did in 2015 if an election were held today, due to gains in Quebec that would make up for losses in Ontario. The Liberals would likely win around 200 seats if an election had been held over the last three months, with about 110 seats going to the Conservatives and just 20 to the NDP.

Green support, at 5.4 per cent, was largely unchanged from the previous quarter.

The Liberals saw their support in British Columbia drop 7.6 points in the last quarter, the largest quarter-to-quarter decrease any party has seen in any region since the election. The Liberals are still ahead in the province, however, averaging 38.3 per cent, followed by the Conservatives at 27.5 per cent and the New Democrats at 21.5 per cent.

Both parties picked up about three points from the last quarter, but are still below their results from 2015.

In Ontario, the Conservatives picked up 6.2 points and averaged37.6 per cent in the province, 2.5 points higher than their last election result. The Liberals dropped 7.2 points their second largest decrease in the country though stilllead with 42.9 per cent.

Themargin between the Liberals and Conservatives stands at just over five points. It was almost 19 points in the last quarter.

The Conservatives have picked up support over three consecutive quarters in Alberta, where they lead with 60 per cent. The Liberals, down five points to 25.6 per cent, are still polling higher than their election result in the province.

In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Conservatives displaced the Liberals to take over the lead at 41 per cent. The Liberals dropped nearly seven points to 33.8 per cent, while the NDP was up 3.1 points to 17.8 per cent. Along with a 3.1 point gain in B.C., this was the NDP's biggest regional jump this quarter.

The Liberals won all 32 seats in Atlantic Canada in the last election and still hold a wide lead in the region, averaging 57.7 per cent to the Conservatives' 22.7 per cent,and 13.4 per cent for the NDP. The Liberals' slide of 3.2 points was their smallest in the country.

The Liberals had a more significant drop in support in Quebec, slipping six points. This decrease reversed four consecutive quarters of gains in the province, largely at the expense of the NDP.

But at 44.7 per cent, the Liberals are still polling significantly above their election haul of 35.7 per cent. This makes Quebec the province in which the Liberals are out-performing their election results by the widest margin insulating themselves against losses in other parts of the country.

The Bloc Qubcois, at 18.2 per cent, narrowly beat out the New Democrats for second spot in Quebec. The NDPwas still well below its election performance in the province at just 17.1 per cent. Though that was a gain of 2.8 points over the previous quarter, their 8.3-point under-performance of the last election is the worst of any party in any region in the country.

Of course, the New Democrats are without a leader, as are the Conservatives and the Bloc Qubcois. The Bloc and Tories will settle their leadership races in April and May, respectively. The NDP will choose its new chief in October.

Of the three, the polls suggestit is the next leader of the NDP that will have the most ground to make up assuming, of course,the slumping Liberals don't do it for them.

These quarterly poll averages are based on the results of 12 national and regional public opinion polls conducted between Dec. 2016 and Feb. 2017 by seven different pollsters, interviewing just under 16,000 Canadian adults using a variety of methodologies, including online panels, interactive voice response and telephone interviews.

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Liberal support slides to lowest levels since 2015 election - CBC.ca

There is a direct lineage between the Occupy Wall Street movement, the enormous and historic contribution that Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersMoral outrage shrouds reality of Russian hacking case Left wing protests only strengthen the Right Sanders, Occupy Wall Street and the liberal Tea Party surge MORE (I-Vt.) made in the 2016 presidential campaign, and what some call the progressive Tea Party movement that, along with other Americans, has besieged Republican officeholders at town meetings across America.

The Sanders campaign for president was a defining moment in American political history one that has continuing impact on his work in the Senate today, the creation of groups such as Our Revolution that supports his agenda, and Sanders's coming role in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential campaign.

The continuing power of the Sanders movement results from the fact that not only did he inspire a large number of citizens to participate in politics, but revolutionized campaign finance by inspiring small donors. Those donors broke the old politics paradigm of seeking large contributions and special interest money that usually paid for consultant-driven negative television ads.

In 2016 Sanders inspired, motivated and organized a continuing political movement based on progressive ideas, institutional reform and the kind of dramatic change that voters hunger for.

Before the Sanders campaign, there was the Occupy Wall Street movement, and today, there is the so-called progressive version of the Tea Party movement reminiscent of the movement that brought conservatives and Republicans to power beginning in the 2010 midterms.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which I strongly supported and continue to support, was a frontal challenge to the power exercised by the 1 percent, who do so at the expense of the 99 percent who are the heart and soul of America.

The mistake many Democrats made, including the Obama White House, was that they felt threatened by Occupy Wall Street. After all, President Obama was not elected in 2008 to name Timothy Geithner, a close ally of the largest financial institutions of the world, as his Treasury secretary. But Obama did.

The mistake Occupy Wall Street made understandably so, but still a tactical mistake was to respond by rejecting involvement in electoral politics.

Sanders and his campaign filled this gap, brought together grassroots action and direct political involvement, and brought large numbers of new people into politics who remain active and engaged in politics today.

The continuing Sanders movement embodied by Our Revolution is critical to the future of American politics, and the so-called liberal Tea Party movement is similar and also important by forcing Republican officeholders to publicly answer questions they would rather duck at town meetings.

With two critical elections approaching in 2018 and 2020, it is important to fully understand and act on the differences between presidential elections and midterm elections just as I mentioned in my last column on the anti-Trump wave that could define the midterm elections in 2018.

In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and all Americans will have the opportunity to elect a transforming progressive president. In the midterm elections, though, the prime directive is to elect the progressive and moderate Democrats needed to put a brake on the power of President Trump and the Republican Congress.

The anti-Trump wave extends far beyond the traditional Democratic base. It includes the huge number of Americans who now realize they will be hurt by repeal or destruction of ObamaCare; the huge number of Americans who are angered and fearful of attacks against a free press; those appalled by the key members of the Trump administration who bear false witness about meetings with the Russians who attack our democracy; and those who reject the "swamp" in Washington that has actually gotten worse, since a number of Trump officials embody the special interests of political "swamp" Trump falsely claimed he would drain.

Democrats and progressives have an opportunity in 2018 to restore and widen our traditional coalition, maintain the momentum of the Sanders movement, inspire voters who stayed home in 2016, and end the one-party monopoly of power that the GOP now holds.

This will require supporting progressive Democrats and also supporting moderate, red-state Democrats, and, above all, finding new and appealing challengers to take the fight to Republicans in every district and state across the nation.

Brent Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Chief Deputy Majority Whip Bill Alexander (D-Ark.). He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He is a longtime regular columnist for The Hill and can be contacted at brentbbi@webtv.net.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

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Sanders, Occupy Wall Street and the liberal Tea Party surge | TheHill - The Hill (blog)