A Personal 📎Note:
From
midnight tonight – May 25 to Monday, August 6 – I am on
“vacation” – sort of... For me, a Democratic Party Citizen
Volunteer, that means I just don't volunteer on my self-imposed schedule.
As a rule, network for #StrongerTogether is published
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. While I'm on vacation this blog will
publish randomly.
So, please hit the blog link and at the top of the
blog – subscribe. It doesn't cost you a thing, it just means you
won't miss the one thing you need to know three times a week.
Thank
you for reading me. Thank you for signing on. Thank you for all
you do to repeal and replace Republicans with Democrats. I really
appreciate it!
Pace yourself. #StayingFocused is hard work...
g., (Unapologetic Democrat)
Focused Read: Highlights in 3 minutes, the full story in 5-6 minutes -- which I highly recommend for greater detail and links!
"The Moral Conundrum of the Trump Era"
(By Dahlia Lithwick)
Should Republicans quit and save themselves, or stay and try to save the rest of us?
"In some ways, last week was a banner week for limited acts of moral courage in the Trump era.
In the Senate, Jeff Flake announced last Wednesday he would join Rand Paul and John McCain to oppose the nomination of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA, citing her ties to a torture regime in which she participated and then worked to obscure. She was still confirmed on Thursday, when six Democrats voted on her behalf.
Also on Wednesday, a host of Senate Republicans voted to save net neutrality. And Sen. Richard Burr joined his colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee to affirm that the Russians did in fact meddle in the 2016 elections, with the purpose of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, a rebuke to the House Intelligence report that claims that nothing of the sort occurred.
Rex Tillerson subtly trolled the president with a commencement speech at the Virginia Military Institute, suggesting that lying is generally not respectable: “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”
A clutch of Republicans in the Senate even criticized the White House for joking about John McCain’s death, though nobody managed to say as much to Trump directly.
Democrats are fond of asking one another how we will know when a genuine constitutional crisis might be upon us. Now some Republicans—despite the visceral joy they might experience when Democrats cluck about constitutional crises—are looking like they might be thinking some of the very same thoughts.
We’ve been hotly debating what moral courage among Senate Republicans and Trump administration officials could look like since Trump took office.
Does it matter when Jeff Flake or Ben Sasse or Bob Corker criticize the president, if they’re doing it while either announcing their departure from the Senate or voting in lockstep with Trump’s agenda? ...
The same questions apply when a former member of the administration raises the alarm right after their departure.
When a Tillerson or a David Shulkin or a H.R. McMaster finally speak up, it’s hard not to wonder what they had been doing colluding all those months and whether what they’re offering now is just too little, too late.
... One can reasonably claim, as does Michael Gerson at the Washington Post,that intermittent outbursts of outrage from Republican leadership, untethered to any meaningful action, is cowardice. Leaving politics altogether, while criticizing your party’s devotion to a lawless authoritarian, feels like the least effective form of taking a stand. ...
More simply, on most days, it would only take three or four Republican senators doing something, anything meaningful to hold Donald Trump’s excesses in check. But in refusing to act in concert, refusing to do more than slouch away, these half protesters are condemning Trump without doing a thing to stop Trumpism. ...
Moral courage in this setting is almost impossible to define. ...
The question remains the same. At what point are Trump’s attacks on his own law enforcement and national security apparatus potentially damaging enough to warrant some kind of response from patriots in both parties? ...
I’ve been searching for some coherent analytic framework for this problem for more than a year—trying to understand what moral courage looks like when you’re contending with failing organizations and institutions.
I was directed to the work of economist and iconoclast A.O. Hirschman, whose most famous book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, published in 1970, lays out a mechanism for clarifying whether participants in a failing organization or government should leave, stay on, or speak up.
Hirschman was an extraordinary and broad thinker who was born in Germany, fled the Nazis, helped create an underground railway for refugees, and became a translator at Nuremberg. After he emigrated to the United States, he focused on development economics. But his thinking was playful and expansive, and he often applied purely economic models to other settings.
... Noting that “under any economic, social, or political system, individuals, business firms, and organizations in general are subject to lapses from efficient, rational, law-abiding, virtuous, or otherwise functional behavior,” the slim book is a strangely timely meditation on whether in any failing system it’s better to cut and run or stick around and complain.
... But as (New Yorker's Eyal)Press has also observed, “the impending departure of [Trump’s] few remaining Republican critics does not threaten his power. It will more likely augment and consolidate it, albeit at a potentially grave cost to the G.O.P., whose other leaders have, like Trump’s advisers, pointedly refused to criticize Trump’s unhinged rhetoric and indecorous conduct.”
But Hirschman also warns of unconscious loyalty to institutions that have changed or deteriorated in ways that go unrecognized by people within those institutions. And, he writes, loyalty increases as members feel that the costs of leaving their group is too high. ...
... The paradox, in part, as he lays it out, means that the worse things become with any organization, the less one is inclined to leave. Lest you become too terrified by that caution, though, Hirschman offers an argument for why this seemingly irrational behavior serves an ultimate good: “The more wrongheaded and dangerous the course of these states the more we need a measure of spinelessness among the more enlightened policy makers so that some of them will still be ‘inside’ and influential when that potentially disastrous crisis breaks out.”
Hirschman ends his meditation by reaffirming that there is no “optimal” mix of exit and voice, and deployment of both depends on the responsiveness of the organization itself. He also notes, perhaps presciently, that the only organizations in which neither exit nor voice is an option are “parties in totalitarian one-party systems, terroristic groups and criminal gangs,” because in such entities “exit is considered as treason and voice as mutiny.”
That brings us to the final paradox...America itself was founded on the principle that exit (i.e., from Europe) was inherently preferable to trying to change things from within. He writes that Americans are uniquely apt to simply exit any given environment rather than raise their voices and get into trouble. ...
Indeed, I might add the 2018 gloss that it is the uniquely American cult of rugged individualism that allows members of a declining government system to make mighty speeches and write solemn books, saving their individual reputations, instead of sticking around and attempting to change government for the rest of us, who are stuck with the systems they broke.
It’s not yet clear to me what Hirschman would say about Trump’s enablers, who have stuck around long after it’s become manifestly clear that someone should have acted long ago and did not. Hirschman holds out the promise that “the jolt provoked by clamorous exit” can still prove beneficial, even late in the game. ...
... This is the time for Sens. Sasse and Flake, for Rex Tillerson, Nikki Haley, and Don McGahn to think about what combination of exit and voice can make a meaningful difference if a real crisis were to happen. Or rather, when the real crisis happens—if we’re not there already."
You can read more here
( Courtesy of Slate )
Focused Thought in 30 seconds
( The meme is courtesy of Tina Vigilante over on Google Plus )
Focused Action 30 seconds
Focused Point of Interest in 3 minutes, 5 minutes if you read the article in full
"What Happens If Republicans Keep Control Of The House And Senate?
Imagine this scenario ⬇
That potential outcome didn’t get enough coverage in the run-up to the 2016 election. So let’s avoid repeating that mistake in 2018.
How would the political world react if Republicans maintained control of Congress in November? I can’t say for sure, but here are four likely responses." :
ONE
Renewed GOP attempts to shrink government...
TWO
Weakening of the investigations against Trump...
THREE
A Democratic freakout...
FOUR
A media reassessment...
Other important things would happen, of course.
GOP control of the Senate would allow Trump to continue to fill federal courts with conservative judges...
Additionally, a good 2018 for the GOP might send the message abroad that the American public has ratified Trump’s domestic and foreign-policy approach, and world leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel might begin to more forcefully distance themselves from the U.S.
“For all those [foreign leaders] who have found reassurance in the idea that this is a temporary aberration and that America will go back to its regularly scheduled programming soon, it would be an argument for starting to recalculate,” said Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.
In any case, it’s worth thinking through the repercussions of various 2018 outcomes, even relatively unlikely ones. As we all should have learned by now, unlikely isn’t the same as impossible.
You can read more here
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→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
Also, NOT exactly a Democratic Party specific source but a good place for to hear and to watch speeches & hearings directly C-SPAN
→ Some of my favorite, most active organizations -- some existing & some developing to elect Democrats:
Born from conversations between Governor Howard Dean and Secretary Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Onward Together was established to lend support to leaders — particularly young leaders — kicking off projects and founding new organizations to fight for our shared progressive values. here
Our mission is to elect more Democrats, and we’re equipping the progressive movement with the right digital organizing tools to do it...MobilizeAmerica is a volunteer management platform and network that enables activists, progressive organizations and Democratic campaigns to connect and win here
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of my favorite, highly credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
📰📰📰📰 The Washington Post
→ Some of my favorite Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
→ Some of my favorite media/panelists -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
✅✅✅✅ Joan Walsh national affairs correspondent for The Nation; CNN political contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @ WashingtonPost's Right Turn, MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @ TheAtlantic covering national security & the intel community. @ NBCNews/@ MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @ WashingtonPost's Right Turn, MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @ TheAtlantic covering national security & the intel community. @ NBCNews/@ MSNBC contributor
( 📎 Interesting to note: Wallace, a former Republican (or an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself) is new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
📎 Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area. And, unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees winning in general elections.
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
( #its2018now )
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Curated by Gail Mountain, this blog is often gently edited and/or excerpted for quick reading, with occasional personal commentary in the form of the written word and/or in the form of emphasis noted. Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter
*
See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
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Thank you for Focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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