Democracy is a Beautiful Thing

By Sjwny, a Trail Mix Contributor

handsSenator Sanders drew 11,400 people to his rally at the University at Buffalo Alumni Center Monday night. 8,000 inside; the remainder standing outside in a cold rain for hours. I listened to the speech on my local NPR station. The crowd reaction was strong to every point made by the Senator.

Secretary Clinton spoke at the Pierce Arrow Museum last Friday. Hundreds attended; in fact, the Buffalo Fire Marshall had to stop letting people in because the building had reached capacity.

Senator Cruz is scheduled to speak in Buffalo this Thursday. A small (but very dedicated) group is reaching out to the Kasich campaign to schedule a stop.

Next Monday, April 18th, Mr Trump will be holding his final New York State rally at the First Niagara Center, which is about 11 minutes from where I live. The building holds 18,690 people. I expect there will be many more than that attending; outdoor screens should be in use.

I welcome them all. Kudos to any Candidate who inspires, reaches out & remembers that he/she works for us. Kudos to every Citizen who participates in any way. Democracy is a beautiful thing & it is in full bloom. I love this stuff.

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46 thoughts on “Democracy is a Beautiful Thing”

  1.  

    liberté, égalité, fraternité… oh yeah, and sororité!

    thanks, sjwny, good up lifting post

  2.  

    from raw story

    “Every four years, America elects a policy wonk — and also like a super-fun sidekick,” he explained, before reassuring the audience, “I know what you’re thinking: ‘Trevor, where would we find a mascot like that? Some brightly-colored cartoon character who pumps up the crowd with a giant head and weird-sized hands as he comes on to the stage to Jock Jams?’

    And that, he suggested, was a role built for Donald Trump.

    “America, I give you your new mascot, and your new national anthem,” Noah said. “Y’all ready for this?”

    The United Kingdom, the host argued, already knows how to split the difference, since it already has Queen Elizabeth II present to carry the crown and be “the most Britishest” person in Britain.

    “Her people love it. And that frees up their prime minister [David Cameron] to be a perfectly mundane politician who runs the country and hides his money in Panama,” Noah noted.

     

     

  3. patd,

    Great poster. A work of art can inspire. One could argue all art is propaganda. Just depends on your point of view.

  4. Sjwny – That was a beautiful post.  Let us hope the DNC and the RNC let the people speak, rather than speaking for us.

    My hope for the future is strong, if people are so hungry for these new ideas (new for our country) that they stand for hours to hear them. I think both party machines have been surprised.

  5. alexandra petri “Please — I’m begging you — do not nominate me for president!”

    I realize that the presidency has become a catch-22: The kind of people who actively want to run for president are the last people you would want to actually be president. Running for president is a horrible nonsense circus. The process is exhausting and the scrutiny practically proctological, and no well-adjusted person would want to repeat the same speech that many times to that many bored people in diners. So the best way to tell if someone would make a good president is to ask yourself: Is this person running for president? Did this person think that running for president would be at all fun or pleasant? If the answer is no, then this could be a well-adjusted person who would make for a good president.

  6. Morning Joe panel admits discussing Clinton’s tone is “a gender thing” — continues to do it anyway
    “Do as we say, not as we do” is apparently the operative phrase at MSNBC this morning VIDEO
    Scott Eric Kaufman

  7. the “c.p.” explanation in ny times
    Mr. de Blasio’s office said he was poking fun only at himself at the satirical Inner Circle dinner in Manhattan, when he joked with Mrs. Clinton at the annual black-tie event that he had been late to endorse her candidacy because he was “running on C.P. time.” a reference to the stereotypical “Colored People Time.” The line drew some cringes from the audience.
    Mrs. Clinton jumped in at the prearranged skit: “Cautious politician time,” she said. “I’ve been there.”
    The exchange prompted a mix of ridicule and bafflement on social media. Mr. de Blasio told CNN on Monday night, “It was clearly a staged show, a scripted show and the whole idea was to do the counterintuitive and say cautious politician time.”
    He said Mrs. Clinton, who is trying to court black voters ahead of the April 19 New York primary, and the other participant in the skit, Leslie Odom Jr., the actor who plays Aaron Burr in the hit musical “Hamilton,” were both in on the joke. He said that they both “thought it was a joke on a different convention” and that “people are missing the point here.”

    at first I tho’t the mayor had mispronounced his line and meant to say “c.t.” referring to “clinton time” aka bill’s propensity to be late to gigs made fun of during his presidency.   lately, hillary has also been lectured on lateness:
    Hillary Clinton is consistently late. And voters are noticing.
    Clinton aides contend that sometimes the candidate runs late because of obvious and unavoidable reasons — spending time with voters, traffic issues and airplane technical issues — but declined to directly comment on the tardiness.
    Attending a Clinton event is an investment of time that many other candidates’ rallies don’t require. Her security is tighter. Lines move more slowly as the Secret Service screens attendees. Sometimes campaign staffers, who see lines of people waiting to get in, are scrambling to hurry people inside before Clinton speaks. [….]
    Clinton isn’t especially unusual in her tardiness. It’s a common affliction for candidates on the campaign trail.
    They’re over-scheduled, running between rallies, private meetings with local supporter and officials, sitting for interviews and headlining fundraisers. Former President Bill Clinton was notorious for often being hours late for events, his former aides argue, because he would shake the hand of every last voter and supporter who came to see him.

  8. Morning Joe stopped being entertaining a long time ago. Seems as if the whole daytime MSNBC programming has gone down the tubes–a cross between CNN and Headline News. Sentient beings need not apply/watch/listen.

  10. The debate on Thursday – Mrs. Clinton should take a valium and only talk about the Republicans

  11. Ryan has to play this more carefully than he did for Speaker.  A lot of Cruz and Trump supporters will be livid if the nomination goes to none-of-the-above.   He wants it.  He loves the attention.  But he has to be more than coy, this time.  I still think the RNC is going to push Ryan/Hayley.

  12. Morning Joe has been trumpeting Trump and Bashing Hillary for months.  Any pretense of being even handed in any way is irrational.  For the rest of the day, if you for any length of time, you see the amount of time given the favored vs the disliked, particularly in the weight given to certain polls and news articles.

     

     

  13. KGC

    She’ll need to take the valium to not be disturbed by the wagging finger or irrationality.

     

  15. Flatus, with respect to several of the shows on MSNBC I agree with you.  I just can’t find anything that is a decent alternative for politics.  Morning Joe has become a tedious anti Hillary crapfest with Joe anti Hillary and Bernie and Mika just anti Hillary, and Andrea Mitchell has become a caricature of herself, breathlessly reporting any perceived misstep by Hillary.  I still like to watch Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, and I’d probably like to watch Chuckie Todd if he was on at a time I could catch him. I occasionally watch CNN but nothing there has really caught on with me.

  16. I think Ryan is happy as the speaker (Not that he wouldn’t want to be president.)   He has a bunch of rather onerous plans he would like to put forward.     He has a better chance to do that as speaker then as president.   He’s young – plenty of time to be savior of the goopers and run in 2024 and still be relatively youthful.

    I think it is politically very smart to not be the martyr for the party this year — let it be the Huckabee/Jindal ticket instead or what about this  Santorum/Fiorina /

    Not much of a choice when you think about –goat or hero? He should tell the Koch Bros to start talking about someone else maybe Scott Walker
     

     

     

  19. I gave up watching cable news shows about 4 years ago.  I now only watch when there’s a debate or a disaster (natural or manmade).  The last time I put on morningjoe was almost 2 yrs ago while Rick was taking a shower when we were on vacation on Cape Cod.  I thought…  good god, this sucks…   found my book instead.  The older I get, the more reading I do.  I’ll read the Christian Science Monitor, The Economist,  the Atlantic, or now Wapo on my iPad while eating breakfast.  The tv rarely goes on in this house before 7pm.

    I also now listen to sports talk radio while weaving.  The Boston stations are hilarious… IMO, nothing beats a good laugh.

  20. “He’s young – plenty of time to be savior of the goopers and run in 2024 and still be relatively youthful.”

    kgc, and by that time he will amass a lot of chits, go on all the right junkets to beef up his foreign policy resume, with growing kids take just the right family value videos and write the requisite bio or his-story books.

     

    pogo, my guess is that they are/were registered democrats (if they ever voted at all) and have to keep mum about it.

  21. I’ve been a speed reader all my life. I had no trouble going through a newspaper in fifteen minutes, magazines in about the same amount of time, and a book a day was my usual fair. My reading speed with excellent comprehension was about 5000 words per minute. I was able to read Spanish language newspapers at about that rate as well.

    No longer. The technique behind being able to do that was snapping mental pictures of paragraphs rather than words, and processing those paragraph images at the same rate of speed as individual words. My eyes have deteriorated to the point where I can no longer capture text in this manner. The fun has gone out of reading–it now borders on drudgery depending on the publication and author.

  22. Flatus…  I am truly sorry about the decline in your reading abilities.  I hope you are able to find fulfillment with learning in another way.  Keep posting here….  we are lucky to have you.

  23. Flatus

    My sympathies.  I have something similar lately though not as severe.  I’ve been reading since I was three and after decades of zipping through a book and hours long reading sessions are over.  Now I have to take it in small doses as it causes a severe headache.  Nothing wrong according to the docs, but definite slow down.

     

  24. Ryan is probably playing a long game.  The Democrats could well take back the Senate, but the House looks safe for Republicans at least in the near future.  That means two to four years as third in line to the Presidency while being a much stronger Speaker than Boehner (The Republicans are going to be desperate for a leader after the current mess).  If he wants it, that would be the perfect set up for 2020 or 2024.

    Might as well take the man at his word for now.

     

  25. response to getting berned

    “As our financial statements clearly show, we’ve paid more than $15.6 billion in taxes over the last two years — that’s a 35% tax rate in 2015, for anyone who’s counting,” wrote McAdam, directing readers to the company’s website in a Tuesday statement.

    The Vermont senator made an appearance at the Verizon picket line in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

    “They want to avoid paying federal income taxes. In other words, this is just another major American corporation, trying to destroy the lives of working Americans,” the presidential hopeful said.

    [….]

    “Contrary to Sen. Sanders’s contention, our proposals do not call for mass layoffs or shipping jobs overseas. Rather, we’ve asked for more flexibility in routing calls and consolidating some of our call centers, some of which employ a handful of people,” the CEO said, directing readers to view Verizon’s proposal.

    McAdam wrote that he understood that “rhetoric gets heated in a presidential campaign.”

    “But when rhetoric becomes disconnected from reality, we’ve crossed a dangerous line. We deserve better from people aspiring to be president. At the very least, we should demand that candidates base their arguments on the facts … even when they don’t fit their campaign narratives,” McAdam wrote.

  26. a solar & sturge must read

    omg?

    If you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of Yahweh, do government officials have to give you the same perks that followers of traditional religions receive? That’s what Cavanaugh wanted to find out.

    And yesterday, U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard ruled that Pastafarianism wasn’t a real religion and its followers are therefore not entitled to the same protections. Gerrard also said that Cavanaugh never really explained “how the exercise of his ‘religion’ has been substantially burdened.”

    If you want to get into the details, there is a law (known as RLUIPA) that says prisoners have religious rights, too. Last July, in a lawsuit filed by the American Humanist Association, courts found that Humanism (i.e. a non-theistic religion) also qualifies under that umbrella. So explicitly godless “religions” must be treated as other religions under the law.

    But Pastafarianism? It doesn’t count, says Gerrard.

  29. Flatus, my Dad’s macular degeneration years ago reduced his reading ability to the point he canceled his newspaper subscription. But he has made good use of text-to-speech software for some things, such as nuance.com

  37. This would be a good time for Bernie to think hard about what his future is.

     

  38. Dear Bernie

    If you don’t win this time.  Do not run again..  Stay in the senate and spend your time organizing for people to run at all levels of government.  Raising money and helping to change the system.  It’s not president of the us but it could have a Yuge impact.

  39. KGC

    good one, reminds me of Jesse Jackson in 88. If he had rallied his supporters to vote for Dukakis  he would have been king of the world instead he whined and complained and 4 years later was a non factor. now it is jesse who?

    so Bernie, get with the program or die.

    what do you want written in your NYT obituary.

    Jack

  40. BTW

    we remember  Teddy fondly not because of his run against Carter but rather for the lessons he learned and his support of the Clintons.

    Jack

  43. Bernie has finally come up with a way to get money to down ticket offices.  He has asked his contributors to split their donations between him and three candidates who have already endorsed him.

    So much for the 50 State program and taking back Congress.

  45. It is time to give the Big Dawg his real job. Building the democratic party.

    Don’t put him in charge just let him show up and draw donations.

     

    Jack

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