John McCain Is The Perfect American Lie

By Drew Magary

Seventeen years ago I gave John McCain’s Presidential campaign five bucks. It was my first time donating to a political campaign, much less a Republican one. But like a lot of people, I marveled at his backstory of surviving years and years in Viet Cong captivity (I even read, like, three pages of that big David Foster Wallace story about him), and—more important—I eagerly took all his Straight Talk Express horseshit to heart. Hey, that Republican is saying stuff about other Republicans! He seems like a real rebel!

Back in 2000, McCain scratched that itch for anyone like me who enjoyed pretending to be politically independent, and who happily latched onto McCain as a talisman of that independence. You see, guys! I can vote for a Republican when it’s the RIGHT Republican! And over the course of this century, McCain has dined out on his reputation as The Good Conservative. He’s the senator who gives thunderous copy to reporters, and does SNL, and issues bipartisan reports on the military giving the NFL promo money, and does the occasional cameo on Parks &Rec. He fulfills every Brokawian wet dream certain members of the press still have about politicians setting aside their differences and doing the RIGHT THING, by God.

Today, Senate Republicans moved one step closer to dismantling Obamacare, potentially leaving millions of people uninsured, jacking up their premiums, and letting insurance companies cover only what they feel like covering. John McCain voted for that bill because of course he did. He has always been a big talker, but when it comes to the actual meat-and-potatoes voting process, he falls in line.

He didn’t do the right thing. He didn’t even come within 500 yards of doing the right thing. For the past two decades, he has never done the right thing. He’s a fraud. Alex Pareene had him nailed ages ago. In fact, it’s “nice” Republicans like McCain who provide cover for evil swine like Mitch McConnell, allowing them to gut the American security net and fuck over anyone who doesn’t live behind an iron gate.

But that didn’t stop McCain from having the gall—the unmitigated, repulsive GALL—to stand up in front of the Senate today and put on his Maverick jammies and deliver a sermon bashing the very non-legislation that, only minutes earlier, he had flown cross-country to help will into being:

https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/889928867468775424

This is the part where I point out that McCain has brain cancer and is likely dying. And while I wouldn’t wish brain cancer on my worst enemy, McCain’s illness shouldn’t act as some magical shield that absolves him from abetting—no wait, LEADING—a GOP whose appetite for brazen monstrousness grows by the day. And yet, there were Senate Democrats giving our man a standing O right after he gleefully fucked their constituents, because Democrats would happily set aside differences with Godzilla for the sake of gentility. There was scumbag opportunist Cory Booker, hugging McCain and acting like this was some kind of heartwarming meeting of the minds. And of course, there were the usual political access merchants who were more than happy to line up and shine McCain’s boots:

https://twitter.com/SCClemons/status/889927208646701058

https://twitter.com/abbydphillip/status/889923333982232576

This is vile. John McCain was never anyone’s white knight. This is the man who ushered in the age of troll candidacies by tapping Sarah Palin as his running mate. This is the man who caved to Donald Trump even after Trump had the audacity to mock his time as a POW. This is the man who called his own wife a cunt in public. This is a man who has spent all this time acting as if all the Bad Republicans were forcing him to go along with their nefarious deeds while voting in lockstep with them. He is not a reluctant Republican. He’s a shitbag, same as the rest of them.

If you’re some Pollyanna offering your support to John McCain as he hollows out Medicaid, you’re a naïve dupe. As this guy said, The West Wing wasn’t real. It was never real. The twin illusions of bipartisanship and decorum have always provided handy cover for anyone looking to willfully ignore the fiendish inequalities of the American political infrastructure and the GOP’s rapturous thirst for cruelty; a thirst that has only recently emerged in the foreground thanks to the existence of President Trump.

"John McCain is the perfect American lie, a man who professes to be noble and fair and just while being none of those things."

I was duped when I gave McCain my pitiable little sum all those years ago, but I know better today. Everyone should know better. Everyone should realize that John McCain is the perfect American lie, a man who professes to be noble and fair and just while being none of those things. He served his country honorably in combat, but in no other fashion. And he serves out his time in the Senate, and here on planet Earth, as a pathetic enabler. Never the lion; always the sheep. For seventeen years, gullible people have been waiting for him to make his face turn, to make some grand defiant move for the sake of God and country. But that was always just clever branding on his part, and today should serve as a cold slap in the face to anyone who still thought he might have that kind of political courage left in him.

He's a fucking disgrace.

TRUMP FAMILY EMPIRE BEGAN WITH A WHORE HOUSE

By Jason Markusoff

October 13, 2016

Donald Trump’s grandfather opened this hotel during the Yukon gold rush, boasting ‘every delicacy in the market’ and ‘private rooms for ladies’

Just off the shores of Lake Bennett, enjoy the best swan and caribou meat you’ll find anywhere in these mountains, and probably better than anywhere in Canada, believe me. Many people from many tents are saying the whiskey is very, very, classy. And the ladies—they’ll make your head spin, and many other things. Those other tents and hotels serve horse meat, and it’s disgusting. If you want luxury as badly as you want gold, there is only one place, and only one name.

OK, this sort of language wasn’t in recorded Klondike Gold Rush texts from 1898, at least not from the proprietor of the New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. But his grandson, Donald Trump, might not have been positioned to dazzle and sometimes terrify America with his boastful sales pitches were it not for Fred Trump and his plucky immigrant’s story, his tasty meals and other delicacies of the flesh, and the small fortune he made in the northern wilds of this country that now has a health care system the Republican presidential candidate says is ruinous, a country that eagerly welcomes the Syrian refugees he calls terror’s Trojan Horse.

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses with his presidential bid, a monument of sorts to his paternal grandfather’s three lucrative years in Yukon and the Canadian North will open along Lake Bennett next year—although that fabled surname won’t appear anywhere near it, in five meter high letters or otherwise.

Before explaining that, let’s go back to a time long before Trump Winery’s bottles were chilled at finer Trump Hotels the world over, to a place where Trumps themselves were in the messy business of cultivating, picking and crushing grapes. Friedrich Trump was born in 1869 in Kallstadt, Germany, in the heart of a western wine making region. Friedrich was no standout among his five siblings—he was too frail to work the family vineyard, says Gwenda Blair, the chief biographer of Trump and these boughs of his family tree. Friedrich’s father died when he was eight. His mother sent Friedrich, at 14, to become a barber’s apprentice. A couple of years later, as the military draft loomed and there wasn’t much hair to cut in his village, the 16 year old Friedrich cobbled together enough Deutschmarks to buy passage on a steamship to New York City.

Frederick Trump (Wikipedia)

The land of opportunity seized him quickly; Friedrich got hired by a barbershop within hours of arriving in Manhattan. Six years on, he grew weary of the living wage work. In 1891, Donald Trump’s grandfather would be first in the chain to dream and reach for something bigger.

Friedrich left his New York enclave of fellow Germans and took his savings across the land to Seattle, a booming resource and port city. He hung his shingle as Fred Trump at the Dairy Restaurant he’d opened in Seattle’s red-light district. In keeping with the local custom, the Dairy’s predecessor eatery advertised “private rooms for ladies”—1891-speak for prostitution—and it’s likely Trump didn’t end the practice, Blair writes in Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire. Shortly, his interest turned to gold; namely, the town of Monte Cristo, which was showing promise for gold and silver deposits, some 110 km east of Seattle. He invested in some land there, but also stuck with plying his hospitality trade for the men doing all the digging.

In the summer of 1897, a ship of grubby and suddenly wealthy prospectors arrived with news of a big gold strike in Canada’s remote northern reaches, near Dawson in the Yukon territory. By then, Trump was already on the hunt for those riches, showing some flashes of his family’s later business savvy—and at the same time his grandson’s blundering streak. Fred Trump had sent two miners north to lay claims, and before the gold-rush headlines hit Seattle’s newspapers, they’d already staked a $15 claim in the Trump name on Hunker Creek, not far from the first strike at Bonanza Creek. A day later, Trump’s associates profited by flipping the land for $400, Blair writes. Flipping was common in the gold rush days.

“It was uncertain whether they were two cents’ worth, let alone two million,” Yukon historian Michael Gates says. Had they held it, these Washington-state miners and Trump could have made vastly more than they did. Hunker Creek claims panned out—yep, that’s where the phrase comes from—as one of the most productive creeks in the gold rush.

It’s unclear whether word of that blown opportunity reached Trump the restaurateur. He was already saving money from his restaurant till to trek north himself. In early 1898, he sailed up the Pacific Coast with gear for the long hike through Yukon, though he “had no plans to mine himself,” Blair writes.

In 1900, the Arctic Hotel moved to Whitehorse. A year later Trump split town; his partner was jailed after a hotel orgy and jewelry theft. (Provincial Archives of Alberta)

Before the train, the gold rush routes were through the Alaska and Canadian mountains. White Pass, which Trump is believed to have taken, was dubbed Dead Horse Trail, the ground a “vile slush” of animal parts, the pass walls “stained dark red from the blood,” Blair writes. Pairing up with a fellow traveler named Ernest Levin, Trump set up a tent restaurant along the route, likely serving up flash-frozen horse meat, according to The Trumps. Then in May 1898, the German-American and his partner escaped the pass and reached the new town of Bennett, a collection of tents and men building Dawson-bound boats and awaiting the ice breakup. Trump and Levin bought lumber to erect a two-story building on Main Street. The New Arctic would feed the thousands of travelers and stranded folks alike, boasting an array of fine and non-equine meats, “Every delicacy in the market,” “Fresh oysters in every style,” and yes, private rooms for ladies.

“Mining the miners was the smart thing to do,” Blair tells Maclean’s. “Where was the money to be made? It was to be made out of the guys doing the hard work, not out of the ground.” Prospectors were lucky to strike any gold, and luckier to escape the Arctic with any wealth; one of the other famed names to rise from the Klondike rush was Alexander Pantages, who started with a theater in Dawson and would later launch a network that included Pantages theaters in Toronto and Winnipeg.

The Guggenheims would find post-rush bounty with a company that dredged Klondike rivers, but already had family riches that the Trumps had yet to amass.

In Bennett came a warning about Trump and women, more than a century before Donald’s brags about groping women would echo through a presidential campaign. A letter-writer in the Yukon Sun said single men would find at the New Arctic the best food in Bennett, but he warned “respectable women” away from staying there, “as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex,” Blair’s book records. Donald Trump, for his part, told the New York Times that reports of prostitution at his granddad’s restaurant are “totally false,” though he was born 28 years after the Yukon entrepreneur’s death.

The Klondike rush had begun its decline by the time New Arctic began in Bennett, but a train close to completion all the way from the port at Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse would outright kill Bennett and its businesses. Trump and Levin set their restaurant’s frame on a raft toward Whitehorse so it could open in time for the White Pass & Yukon Route’s opening in summer 1900. With a wood-framed tent and a false facade, the Arctic Restaurant opened up across Front Street from the terminal. In this fledgling city, there was competition: the Hotel Grand and White Horse Hotel on the same block dwarfed the Trump eatery. Rivals advertised fine hotels and cigars, or stabling for dogs and horses; the Arctic was more vague and braggadocious, offering itself as the “newest, neatest and best-equipped north of Vancouver,” states Trump’s ad in the Whitehorse Star.

Prospectors were struggling up north, but business remained brisk, even if winter was dreadful and dreadfully slow. “We have come to stay,” a February 1901 restaurant ad proclaimed. (Wrong!) That spring, Trump left town just as a new crackdown came on liquor and other vices. He sailed home to Germany with a nest egg of roughly $500,000 in current value, found a wife and then returned to New York, where his son would launch his family into land development.

Back in Whitehorse, Levin got into landlord troubles (with someone who didn’t actually own the land anyway) and lost control of the Arctic in 1902, when jailed after a hotel orgy and jewelry theft—a running mate who would have embarrassed a Trump, not the other way around.

This was a Trump who knew when to quit. The 1901 Canadian census counted 27,000 Yukon residents, more than Vancouver had at the time. A decade later, the territorial population plunged by two-thirds. In new hands, the restaurant burned down in the great Whitehorse fire of 1905; it was rebuilt but didn’t last long. On its site now is the low-slung Horwood Mall, full of Bernie Sanders-friendly local boutiques like Baked Café, Cultured Cheese and Climate Clothing. Trump history has little to no imprint on Whitehorse, save southerners’ mainly recent interest. “There are a lot of people who gain a piece of the action in the Yukon, make money and either never live there or only come very briefly and go on to make lives elsewhere,” says Whitehorse historian Linda Johnson.

It’s a different story down in Bennett. All that remains from the gold rush town is the vacant church.

But that’s changing, as the nearby Carcross-Tagish First Nation and Parks Canada combine to create a high-end “glamping” experience with tent-style cabins and a recreated restaurant for those shelling out $1,600 for four nights to stay at Chilkoot Trail Village. “At the heart of the village is a replica of the famous Arctic Restaurant & Hotel, that was ‘the place to be’ at Bennett City during the stampede to the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898,” states the attraction’s draft website by Nature Tours Yukon, which will market the frontier-inspired experience.

The promoters are treating the family link to the controversial politician as an awkward historical fact rather than a marketing ploy. “For us, it’s more of a campfire tall story,” says Nature Tours president Joost Van Der Putten.

Would that change if Trump wins, and this becomes part of presidential family lore? “Probably not, and you never can tell the way things work out,” Van Der Putten says. “In marketing and sales, you have to seize opportunity as it comes; that is something Mr. Trump is teaching us.”

Due to the 1918 flu pandemic that felled Fred Trump, Donald never got to hear Klondike tales from his grandfather, or learn about the hard work trudging through Yukon mountains or running an anything-goes restaurant. Fred Trump’s grandson isn’t one to tolerate a kitchen’s heat or an Arctic deep freeze. But the bold and whatever-it-takes-to-prosper steps? Those seem to be inherited traits.

Donald Trump's ancestral whore house gets a new lease on life

America’s Last King: The Unsettling Parallels Between King George III And Donald Trump

Inexperienced authoritarian with a habit of blasting out his opinions in the wee hours of the morn? Sounds familiar.

By Willard Sterne Randall


Photo Credit: Allan Ramsay [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When he assumed his nation’s highest office, he had no previous governmental experience. Born wealthy, he’d never worked for anyone else. Now his nation’s commander in chief, he had never served in the military.

For his every move, he relied on a secretive, eccentric advisor bent on reshaping the nation’s political order. Demanding absolute loyalty, the new ruler did not trust anyone more popular than he was, and detested all opposition.

If these facts sound familiar, they fit not only Donald Trump but America’s last king, George III.

He came to power at the moment of England’s greatest glory, its defeat of France for control of North America.

For a century after a bloody civil war that had ended with the beheading of its king, England’s monarchs had reigned, not ruled, all power vested in Parliament. Ministers backed by Parliament ruled.

Since the Restoration, monarchs had contented themselves with acquiring estates and amassing art collections — and lovers. They concentrated on maintaining a Protestant dynasty and defeating the hated French in a contest for global monopoly. Only one ever tried to turn back the clock to a powerful monarchy. He was forced to throw his mace into the Thames and flee for his life.

George III, shunned by his dissolute father, lived with his mother and eight siblings until the day he inherited the throne. Home-schooled by the reclusive John Stuart, Earl of Bute, he learned to abhor Parliament and opposition of any kind.

Still unmarried when a courier interrupted his daily ride to tell him the old king was dead, George promptly fired his brilliant and popular prime minister, William Pitt, replacing him with his tutor, a man so unpopular that crowds often attacked his carriage.

While George prided himself on being the first Hanoverian king born and bred in Britain, he feared an Englishwoman would have powerful court connections. Bute advised him to seek a bride in Germany, home of his ancestors. George never met 17 year old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz until she arrived with her ladies-in-waiting and went right into isolation. She soon began to bear George’s 14 children.

Suffering from porphyria, a rare hereditary metabolic disorder, George took advantage of severe insomnia — he once went entirely without sleep for 72 hours — to write nocturnal notes, letters, critiques of cabinet ministers and generals, letters to citizens with complaints. Nothing was too great or trivial, from the stipends of parish clergy and the royal laundress’s pension to his comments on military campaigns.

Obsessed with time and timepieces — he gave Charlotte 24 bejeweled clocks for their bedchamber — often before five in the morning he dipped his quill, noting the minute and the hour atop each missive. Even as Parliament refused to pay for a private secretary, George advocated importing cheaper workers to drive down wages and increase employers’ profits.

Living frugally day to day, he lavished money on renovating the new royal residence, Buckingham House. In private, he entertained his queen by playing the harpsichord; they sang and conversed in German. She loved opera; he, theater. He first acted in a Roman play at 10. He roared his approval at David Garrick’s plays.

And George III chose a playwright as the commanding general of his most fateful military expedition.

At first, as Americans protested Parliamentary taxes, George wrote he believed the “mother country” should practice “moderation” and “firmness” with her recalcitrant colonies. But after the Boston Tea Party, he wrote, “The colonies must either submit or triumph. . . . We must not retreat.”

The first year of the American Revolution went badly for the British. Bloodied at Concord and Bunker Hill, stymied by Benedict Arnold’s navy on Lake Champlain, nearly losing Canada and repulsed at Charleston, the first British commanders felt the wrath of George’s disapproval.

The theater-loving king knew “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, a mediocre playwright and compulsive gambler. Illegitimate son of an earl, Burgoyne had distinguished himself in combat as the risk-taking commander of the Coldstream Guards.

Sent to America as second-in-command of the failed first invasion from Canada, he hurried back to London to draw up plans for a new invasion. On March 26, 1777, in a private audience, the King personally approved Burgoyne’s secret orders to launch a second invasion from Canada to split off rebellious New England by marching south from Montreal to Albany to link up with an army led by Sir William Howe, to march north from New York City.

In addition to taking heavy artillery, Burgoyne was to employ “savages” and “light forces” made up of German jaegers. Often misidentified as Hessians, they were schoolmasters, tavern keepers, tramps, violinists — anyone their princes could round up and pack off to fight. Rented out, they were literally owned by their prince: If they died, the prince was compensated, not their families. It was George who, against Burgoyne’s wishes, insisted “Indians must be employed.”

The plan began to fray by the time Burgoyne was ready to march. Fifteen percent of the mixed force of British, German and French-Canadian troops had to be left behind to garrison Canada. Only 400 Native Americans turned up. To drag 144 heavy cannons and haul enough provisions for 30 days for nearly 10,000 men — including 1,000 gallons of rum — Burgoyne needed 1,000 horses; he could only buy 400. The German cavalry would have to walk.

It rained for three weeks as they slogged south along the New York shore of Lake Champlain to the accompaniment of German martial tunes, soldiers and their wives struggling through the quagmire. Only officers got to sail.

Convening a “Congress of Indians,” Burgoyne threatened the Americans: “I have only to give stretch to the Indian forces under my command . . . to overthrow the hardened enemies of Great Britain.” His theatrical speech only guaranteed that thousands of American militia would turn out to oppose him.

Ordering “a reliance on the bayonet,” Burgoyne reached Ft. Ticonderoga, abandoned when the British took an undefended hill overlooking the fortress. The Americans had begun a fighting retreat.

Yet when the King heard of Ticonderoga’s fall, he exulted to the queen, “I have beat them, beat all the Americans.”

But he had not. Time became Burgoyne’s worst enemy. All night, he could hear the dull thwack of axes and the crash of trees as a growing American army blocked the only road, slowing Burgoyne to a mile a day. Rations dwindled; dragoons were still on foot. A German raid on Vermont to round up beef cattle and horses failed miserably. Burgoyne lost one-fifth of his force.

By the time he crossed the Hudson at Saratoga, he faced thousands of entrenched Americans armed with newly arrived, French-provided artillery. In two losing battles, Burgoyne’s army hemorrhaged casualties even as thousands more Americans encircled him.

Howe never arrived. He unilaterally decided to take Philadelphia and settle in for the winter.

Outnumbered three to one, Burgoyne surrendered. King George’s invasion plan did not include an exit strategy.

The greatest victory of the Revolutionary War, Saratoga convinced the French that, with enough military assistance, the United States could defeat England.

Disgraced, “Gentleman Johnny” returned to the one place he would ever receive accolades — the London stage — with the King cheering lustily in the audience. He had little else to cheer; he had lost America.

Willard Sterne Randall is the author of "Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution," a journalist and author of several biographies of Founding Fathers. He is a Distinguished Scholar in History and Professor at Champlain College. He lives in Burlington, Vermont with his wife, with whom he has co-authored multiple volumes of history.

Kurt Eichenwald: 'and they smiled and high-fived'

https://www.facebook.com/kurt.eichenwald.1/posts/1448157071889590

In 1986, I left a job I loved for one I hated. I had been desperately sick for seven years, with medical bills no one could possibly cover. But I was approaching the dreaded age of 25, when I would be forced off of my parent’s insurance policy. Everyone knew, without insurance, I would die. I was frequently hospitalized. My treatments were very expensive. But the job I loved offered no insurance. The one I hated did.

This was the second time insurance chose the direction of my life. I applied for the job of my dreams a year before. The boss told me he wanted to hire me, but theirs was a small company. They already had a person with high medical costs on salary. If they hired me, he said, their insurer would drop them. Insurance companies could do that back then.

But with the job I hated, I thought I was safe. Then I found out, even the group policy had a preexisting condition clause: I would not be insured for nine months. I could not stay. I would go bankrupt. And so, I went to find another job. All I wanted was insurance. It didn’t matter the job. Insurance would decide my career.
 
I had been a political writer at CBS, an associate editor at National Journal. Very successful at my age. But I only had a few weeks until I was uninsured. I begged a friend at the New York Times to help me. He offered to help me land a position as a copy boy. It was a terrible job, he knew, but it had insurance. At first, I was turned down for the job – I was way too overqualified, the HR person said. But my friend intervened and, after years of personal success, I agreed to take a job fetching people’s coffee.

There was a two-week period before I began my job when I was completely uncovered. I ended up hospitalized. By the time I was conscious, I had rung up a bill in excess of $10,000. That was almost half my expected full-year salary. I called my parents, in tears. I didn’t know what to do. They told me they would take care of it.

Nothing was more depressing than having to have given up everything for insurance, to take a job where everyone was younger than me, everyone was far less experienced than me. And I knew, if I lost my job, I would lose my insurance. And if I lost my insurance, I could die. So I worked – seven days a week, 12-18 hours a day. If nothing else, that helped me believe I would not be fired from my lousy job. But it also gave me the chance to write for various sections of the paper. I would do my copy boy job eight hours a day, then start reporting and writing. This went on for two years – no vacations, no break, terrified every day.

Then, I was offered a junior reporter’s job at the Times. One-year tryout. I worked almost every day. I rarely left the office. I knew the stakes. For me, this wasn’t about being a reporter. This was about keeping my insurance.

In my late 20's, I married. My wife is a doctor. At that point, I had greater freedom. Even if I lost my job, I could be on her insurance. Because of that freedom, I began to write books. If the Times got mad at me for it, it would be ok. But still, I could never shake the belief that I could never say no. I took every assignment. I did not take book leaves. We rarely vacationed.

I finally started to relax around 2008. I had never lost insurance for 12 years. Then, a miracle: the rules keeping people with preexisting conditions from being insured were ended under ACA. I listened to blowhards like Rush Limbaugh rage that people like me – and people with asthma and cancer and cystic fibrosis – were leeches, demanding charity. It amazed me how stupid he and his followers were, not understanding that, without private insurance, people like me would all be on government disability. We would have to stop working in order to survive. People were instilled with rage about a topic they didn’t even understand.

No matter. I knew I would never have to face that problem again. More important, I knew the millions and millions of others like me – young kids, middle aged, whatever – would never again be forced to make decisions about their lives giving up their dreams solely for the insurance. I would hear every day from my wife about people who came to her office in horrible medical shape, people who had gone without treatment or sought their medical care at emergency rooms. People who could only get care in the ER rang up giant medical bills, so expensive no one could pay them. And so the taxpayers picked up the cost. Now, those same people were getting care from my wife with insurance they purchased. Opponents raged about their taxes paying for the subsidies, so ignorant they had no idea their taxes had been paying for the far more expensive emergency room care before.

Last week, the House passed a bill that would push everyone with preexisting conditions back into the same situation. The representatives billowed and cooed that high-risk pools would protect us, fooling the same uneducated ones who didn’t know they paid for the uninsured. High risk pools had been tried before. They failed. But these members of congress probably didn’t even know that. They didn’t care enough to hold hearings to find out whether high-risk pools would work. They didn’t wait to find out how many people would lose their insurance. They had to rush it through. Then they cheered for themselves.

Meanwhile, those of us with preexisting conditions were plunged back into fear. Foundations for people with chronic diseases began receiving phone calls from panicked people. My wife and I reviewed our options if this bill became law. We are middle aged now, which presented new issues. She is four years older than me. She hits retirement age in five years. If she retired and was on Medicare, I would be clinging to a slender thread to keep my insurance. I could never write another book. It would be too dangerous. My wife said she would work until she was almost 70 to keep me safe. Guilt overwhelmed me. She was born in Britain, and we discussed her citizenship and, if necessary, we could move there if I lost my coverage. We would have to burn through our savings for a long time, but eventually I might be able to get onto national health insurance.

But I don’t want to leave America. I don’t want my wife to work until she’s almost 70. I don’t want to be guilty. And most important, I don’t want all the other people with preexisting conditions to be forced to make their life decisions based on where they can get group insurance. Or worse, to not be able to obtain group insurance, be denied private insurance and die.

I watched Fox News. They giggled and laughed that people were being hysterical about preexisting conditions. There were high-risk pools, they sneered, that states could participate in unless they didn’t want to. I watched the clip, over and over, of those self-congratulatory members of Congress, high-fiving and smiling, as I knew the situation at my house was playing out at millions of houses where talking points and rationalizations didn’t change the realities of what we would face. I commented about how terrible this was. And then I saw comments from people deriding those with preexisting conditions as wanting charity.

I thought of members of Congress who wanted prisons as brutal as possible, until they themselves were jailed; then, they became advocates for prison reform. I thought of the ones who screamed about gays until their child came out, then they became tolerant. I thought about the members of Congress who happily sent other people’s children off to fight in Vietnam, while getting their own kids deferments and spots in the National Guard or reserves, making sure they wouldn’t see battle. And then I thought of the child whose parents home I visited, who told me of their boy dying of suffocation in his mother’s arms as they rushed to the hospital. They hadn’t been able to afford his inhaler that week. They had no insurance. They planned to buy it the week that followed. Their son died two days after they decided to take the risk.

And the members of Congress smiled and high-fived.

More people’s children would die. And the members of Congress smiled and high-fived. People would be forced to take jobs they did not want or marry people they did not love. And the members of Congress smiled and high-fived. For millions, every day would be terrifying as they wondered if they would they run up bills that day that would bankrupt them or would they be unable to get treatment? Would they live through the week? And the members of Congress smiled and high-fived.

My anger exploded. I wanted them to feel the consequences of what they thought was so wonderful. Why should they be exempt from the damage they would inflict on others from their vote, votes they cast with so little concern about others that they didn’t hold hearings to find out what damage they might cause?

And so I tweeted, “As one with a preexisting condition, I hope every GOPr who voted for Trumpcare get a long-term condition, loses their insurance, and die.”

Harsh? You bet. I wanted the words to be blunt, to lay out the reality of what real people would face, people who didn’t have the ability of members of Congress to avoid the consequences they voted to inflict on real people.

Conservatives broke out the fainting couches. I was wishing Republicans to die, they moaned. I forgot we live in an era where fools will interpret it the way they are told. One of the propagandists at the Daily Caller, after emailing me for comment at 3:00 in the morning, posted a story proclaiming I wanted my political opponents to die. And the conservative trolls descended, screaming for my death.

I remain angry. I remember the tears of that woman whose son died in her arms. I remember my struggles. I remembered my fears. I remembered the fears of so many others I have spoken to over the years who struggled with preexisting conditions.

I deleted the tweet. Apparently, confronting people with the reality of what they have chosen is just too inappropriate. Voting to let people die is fine, rubbing the fact that they voted to do that is just wrong.

Do I regret what I said? No. I want those words to sink in. My tweet won’t kill anyone. But the vote from those members of Congress will.

And if they are not forced to confront what they are doing, they will just keep smiling and high-fiving.

Mitch McConnell Goes Down In Flames Defending His Merrick Garland Hypocrisy

How the fuck does Kentucky keep re-electing this guy?  dlevere.

By David



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Sunday blamed the American people for the decision of Senate Republicans not to grant President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Judge Merrick Garland, a hearing.

"The tradition had been not to confirm vacancies in the middle of a presidential [election] year," McConnell told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. "You'd have to go back 80 years to find the last time it happened... Everyone knew, including President Obama's former White House counsel, that if the shoe had been on the other foot, [Democrats] wouldn't have filled a Republican president's vacancy in the middle of a presidential election."

"That's a rationale to vote against his confirmation," Todd argued. "Why not put him up for a vote? Any senator can have a rationale to not to vote for a confirmation. Why not put Merrick Garland on the floor and if the rationale is, 'You know what? Too close to an election,' then vote no?"

McConnell laughed defensively.

"Look, we litigated that last year," the Majority Leader stuttered. "The American people decided that they wanted Donald Trump to make the nomination, not Hillary Clinton."

McConnell argued that Democrats should focus on the issue at hand, the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, Trump's Supreme Court pick.

"There's no rational reason, no basis for voting against Neil Gorsuch," McConnell opined.

"You say it's been litigated, the Garland situation," Todd replied. "For a lot of Senate Democrats, they're not done litigating this... What was wrong with allowing Merrick Garland to have an up or down vote?"

"I already told you!" McConnell exclaimed. "You don't fill Supreme Court vacancies in the middle of a presidential election."

"Should that be the policy going forward?" Todd interrupted. "Are you prepared to pass a resolution that says in election years any Supreme Court vacancy [will not be filled] and let it be a sense of the Senate resolution, that says no Supreme Court nominations will be considered in any even numbered year? Is that where we're headed?"

"That's an absurd question," McConnell complained. "We were right in the middle of a presidential election year. Every body knew that either side -- had the shoe been on the other foot -- wouldn't have filled it. But that has nothing to do with what we're voting on this year."

Rednecked, Racist Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Won't Rule Out Using Mafia Law To Go After Legal Marijuana

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/attorney-general-sessions-rule-out-using-mafia-law-go-after-legal-marijuana

Martin Luther King Would And Did Fuck Trump's Shit Up

Posted by Rude One

1/16/2017

As we prepare for an open racist to ascend to the never more aptly-named White House, we need to remember, as this blog does every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, that King wasn't a conservative, as Republicans and, weirdly, the Washington Post assert. No, King was a radical who made it his job to fuck up the nice little world that whites had constructed. So forget all that bullshit trying to make King into Fuzzy Marty, the Dream Hatchanimal, all ready to cuddle you with his non-violence. And, instead, let King's strength, power, and lack of fucks to give guide you as we head into the Trump era.

For instance, back in July 1966, a little over 50 years ago, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led a march and held a rally in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement, which asked that blacks and whites be treated equally when it came to housing in the city. (The play Raisin in the Sun was based in the housing discrimination endemic to the Windy City.) King had moved into a slum in January of 1966, where he lived several days a week, to shed light on the conditions there. He threatened to lead rent strikes if things weren't improved. "We don't have wall-to-wall carpeting to worry about," King said of his apartment. "But we have wall-to-wall rats and roaches."

On July 10, in the midst of a savage heat wave, King held a rally at Soldier Field, followed by a march to city hall to demand that blacks be allowed to rent and buy apartments in white neighborhoods. Only 30,000 of the expected 100,000 came out to see him in the nearly 100 degree temperature, but King gave a rousing and curiously little-quoted speech about the need for fairness in housing as being one more part of the road to a free and equal United States.

King started, "We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the withering flames of injustice. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums and in the Chicago Housing Authority's cement reservations. We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for 4 rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for 5 rooms." People forget that King could be incredibly specific and localized in his demands, that he wasn't just seeking blanket "rights." No, he wanted definite wrongs corrected.

He continued further in the speech, "Let me say, here and now, that we are not going to tolerate moves that are now being made in subtle manners to intimidate, harass, and penalize Negro landlords who may own one or two buildings while ignoring the fact that slums are really perpetuated by the huge real estate agencies, mortgage and banking institutions, and city, state, and federal governments. This day we must decide that we will no longer use our dollars to perpetuate segregation and discrimination. We must make clear that we will withdraw our money en masse from any bank that not have a non-discriminatory lending policy. We must affirm that we will withdraw economic support from any company that will not provide on-the-job training, and employ an adequate number of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other ethnic minorities in higher paying jobs."

Does that sound fuckin' conservative? Does that sound like someone who is kissing the ass of tradition and power structures? How about this: "This day we must decide to give greater support to Negro-owned businesses which will aid in building our economic strength." He implored non-violence. He said that there were whites that supported the cause. But, ultimately, he said that non-whites shouldn't participate in an economic system that dicked them over.

Then King led people to city hall where, among other things, he demanded an end to police brutality in Chicago. We see how that turned out today. Back in 1966, he was mocked by the Chicago Tribune, which said that King's marches and sermons had become "tiresome" and "stale." A march in Marquette Park in August turned violent, with white onlookers hurling rocks and bottles at the marchers, and King was injured. He said later that he had never seen mobs of whites "as hateful" as he saw in Chicago, not even in Mississippi or Alabama.

King always believed that he had failed in Chicago, especially since Mayor Daley didn't abide by promises he made to King about open housing. But his assassination in 1968 was followed almost immediately by President Lyndon Johnson signing the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited housing discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. And this is where we get to Donald Trump.

Five years after King's death, in 1973, Trump Management was accused by the Justice Department of violating the civil rights of blacks and Puerto Ricans under the Fair Housing Act. Fred Trump and his son, Donald, were specifically named as defendants. And while the case was settled without an admission of guilt, well, c'mon, the evidence was pretty damning that Trump rental agents deliberately steered non-white clients away from all-white apartment buildings. Trump Management agreed not to discriminate and to advertise that all buildings were open to everyone.

So, remember, on this MLK Day, that when Trump attacks Rep. John Lewis, one of King's closest associates, the President-Elect is also going after the man and the group that fucked his shit up early in his career. That King continues to do so to this day speaks to how much he will always be far more powerful than Trump ever could hope to be.

IGN Presents the History Of Bourne

In the mid-1970s notorious Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal orchestrated a high-profile attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria which resulted in the deaths of three people. It was just one of a string of crimes committed by Carlos across the continent, making him one the most-wanted fugitives of the era.

Back in the 70's American author Robert Ludlum didn’t know a great deal about Carlos the Jackal, but that soon changed.

One night Ludlum and his wife tuned in to a radio program featuring journalist Pierre Salinger; Ludlum wasn’t aware what he was on air to speak about and had chosen to listen largely due to the fact Salinger had written an introduction to the French edition of Ludlum’s 1977 novel The Chancellor Manuscript.

It turned out Salinger was discussing Carlos the Jackal, which piqued Ludlum’s interest. He immediately began researching the infamous assassin.

What next for the Supreme Court?

Supreme Court experts join Chris Hayes to discuss what happens if the Court does not get a tie-breaking ninth justice for a year or more.

Why Children Get Gifts On Christmas: A History

By Paul Ringel

An 1881 illustration by Thomas Nast, published in Harper's. Nast created the image of Santa Claus that endures today. Wikimedia Commons

During a week when so many Americans have experienced some combination of joy, rage, and frustration in seeking the perfect holiday gifts for their children, it seems appropriate to pause and ask: Where did the practice of giving Christmas gifts to children come from?

There does not appear to be an easy answer. Gifts do not primarily serve as rewards: Commentators on the political left and right have in recent years asked parents to abandon the “naughty and nice” paradigm that suggests such presents are prizes for good behavior, and indeed historical evidence suggests that proper conduct has not been a widespread prerequisite for young Americans to receive Christmas gifts.

Nor do presents seem to have a clear connection to Christian faith. Some American families have established a “three-gift” Christmas in an effort to link the practice to the generosity of the three wise men in the story of Jesus’s birth, but again no broad historical precedent exists for this link. In fact, religious leaders have long been more likely to decry the commercialization of Christmas as detracting from the true spirit of the holiday than to celebrate the delivery of purchased goods to middle-class or wealthy children. (Donating gifts to poor children is a different matter, of course, but that practice became common in the United States only after gift-giving at home became a well-established ritual.)

Critics of the commercialization of Christmas tend to attribute the growth of holiday gift-giving to corporate marketing efforts. While such efforts did contribute to the magnitude of the ritual, the practice of buying Christmas presents for children predates the spread of corporate capitalism in the United States: It began during the first half of the 1800's, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home and child centered holiday.

This reinvention was driven partly by commercial interests, but more powerfully by the converging anxieties of social elites and middle-class parents in rapidly urbanizing communities who sought to exert control over the bewildering changes occurring in their cities. By establishing a new type of midwinter celebration that integrated home, family, and shopping, these Americans strengthened an emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer capitalism.

In his book The Battle for Christmas, the historian Stephen Nissenbaum presents the 19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of New York’s elites over the city’s emerging working classes. 

New York’s population grew nearly tenfold between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night or New Year’s Eve. 

These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European peasants’ (or American slaves’) discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle. 

In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.

In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have established that these supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North America. 

Drawing from two story collections by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, solidified the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in 1822.

The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was not a wholesale invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed, he was not a well-established part of New York’s winter holiday rituals. Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned with a newly emerging practice in 1820's New York, although the giving of homemade gifts during the winter holidays appears to have begun by the late 1700's. Moore’s poem does not explain why children are receiving presents on Christmas, although they clearly have the expectation of receiving special treats (“visions of sugar plums danced in their heads”). 

Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition requires an expansion of Nissenbaum’s story. The Battle for Christmas focuses on the tensions between New York’s elites and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas served their purposes as well. 

Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market capitalism would do to their children—particularly because an expansion of goods and services on offer was reducing young people’s household responsibilities at a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet to emerge.

In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new strategies for child-rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the corrupting influences of commerce on kids’ inchoate moral character. Elites’ efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents’ interests, for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and physically protective space of home.

Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of letting children’s commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820's, an American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining children’s magazines in U.S. history debuted between 1823 and 1827.) Much of the initial demand for these items reflected parents’ recognition of the instructional power of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical children’s magazine The Youth’s Friend noted,

Let the Youth’s Magazine be called his own paper, and how will the juvenile reader clasp it to his bosom in ecstacy [sic] as he takes it from the Post-Office. And if instruction from any source will deeply affect his heart, it will when communicated through the medium of this little pamphlet.

If early 19th-century newspaper ads promoting bibles as children’s Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children. After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it increasingly difficult to control children’s access to toys, books, and magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their offspring.

Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed image of St. Nicholas. Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nick was an elf who was jolly but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrator’s repeated reminder that he had “nothing to dread”). 

During the 1860's, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm, grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games, and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nast’s Santa figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine Hearth and Home.

Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.

In the nearly two centuries since New Yorkers instigated the invention of today’s Christmas rituals, American families have invested gift-giving and other widely practiced holiday traditions with their own unique meanings. Identifying the origins of these rituals as historical rather than eternal reinforces their power to do so.

Native American Day 2015: Facts And History For North America's First Residents, Before Christopher Columbus

By Jess McHugh

Native American advocacy groups have pushed to change Columbus Day to Native American Day or Indigenous People's Day. Pictured: Lakota spiritual leader Chief Arvol Looking Horse attended a demonstration against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in January 2015. AFP/Getty Images

As people around the United States celebrate Columbus Day Monday, with government offices and most schools closed, many others will be hosting festivities for an alternative celebration: Native American Day. The relatively new holiday, celebrated in cities and towns across the country, was started as a way to honor the indigenous people who were living in North and South America long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

At least nine cities in the U.S. will be officially celebrating "Indigenous Peoples Day" this year, including Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota, and Olympia, Washington, the Associated Press reported. Many of the festivities on this day involve celebrating traditions specific to the tribes of the region as well as educating other people about the culture and history of Native Americans.

The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain, landing in what is now the Bahamas in 1492. Columbus since has been credited with discovering the New World. Indigenous people from tribes across North and South America have protested his title as discoverer, pointing out that they had lived in the Americas long before 1492. Some scientists estimate the indigenous people in the Americas arrived at least 12,000 years ago.

NPR: Seattle Swaps Columbus Day For #IndigenousPeoplesDay http://t.co/nlhEfATbQA @NPR pic.twitter.com/GYDWPrkH2d

— Vote Sawant (@VoteSawant) October 11, 2015

Ghost Dance: It's Time To Replace #ColumbusDay With Indigenous Peoples' Day (VIDEO) >>> http://t.co/fb9n7qaSVv <<< pic.twitter.com/S0LJEwrFQR

— Reverb Press (@ReverbPress) October 11, 2015

Columbus' journey led to thousands of Europeans from across the continent leaving to come to the Americas to make their fortunes. As more and more settlers arrived, the Europeans often used force to push Native Americans off their land. Europeans also brought with them many diseases to which the native population never had been exposed and to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox and measles. As many as 20 million Native Americans died in the centuries following the arrival of European settlers.

As a result of this painful history, many Native American activists have been pushing to have the name of the holiday officially changed for more than four decades. Advocacy groups focused on getting city councils to pass the resolution separately from a federal government that has not made the change.

"For the Native community here, Indigenous Peoples Day means a lot. We actually have something," said Nick Estes, an Albuquerque resident who organized celebrations for the holiday following its recent passage by city government, the AP reported.

"We understand it's just a proclamation, but at the same time, we also understand this is the beginning of something greater," Estes said.

A timeline of human history, from 4004 BC to 1881

By Jason Kottke

From the David Rumsey Map Collection, a remarkable timeline/history of the world from 4004 BC to 1881 called Adams' Synchronological Chart. This is just a small bit of it:


According to Rumsey's site, the full timeline is more than 22 feet long. (via @john_overholt)

Update: A replica of this chart is available on Amazon in a few different iterations...I'm going to give this one a try. Apparently the charts are popular in Sunday schools and such because the timeline uses the Ussher chronology where the Earth is only 6000 years old.