monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I think we should all encourage [Ryan] in this belief.

This is a bit tricky. Certainly in Ontario, the Greens are fiscally closer to Conservatives than to the Liberals or NDP.

maybe it'll work
maybe not

The Green Party of Ontario shares the same Ten Key Values as other North American Greens. Although the party has generally been perceived as being left-wing, the party combines ecologically and socially reformist policies with strong respect for the free market and entrepreneurship. Many key members are recruits from the former centre-right Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, including Elio Di Iorio, who was a protégé of former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, and Peter Elgie, son of former Ontario Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Robert Elgie.[21] The party's newly chosen Chief Financial Officer, David Scrymgeour, was the National Director of the former Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Under Frank de Jong, the GPO has emphasized policies typical of both left- and right-wing parties. In the words of de Jong, the GPO tends to favour policies that are "socially progressive, fiscally conservative, and environmentally aware".[22] As such, policies in areas such as education, health, environmental protection and social equity are notably progressive, while policies on income & property taxation, market regulation, and industrial subsidization are more conservative in nature.

Democrats can do better among blue-collar whites. In his speech to supporters last night, Lamb stressed the importance of organized labor to the future of the Democratic Party, spoke up for the value of unions and work, and emphasized the importance of maintaining bedrock programs such as Medicare and Social Security. He had also campaigned against the GOP tax cuts as a giveaway to the rich — and, importantly, blasted the tax cuts for creating deficits that would require deep cuts to entitlements, harming the middle class.

Trump’s top appointees, exemplified by the Cabinet, are in their jobs for only three reasons: to demolish the federal government; to spend taxpayers’ money on luxury travel and office refurbishing; and to toady to the president in public and obey his policy whims in private. Tillerson is out because he succeeded in only the first of these by decimating the State Department. His successor, Mike Pompeo, will not make Tillerson’s mistake. He’s the very model of a heel-clicking Vichy Republican.

The latest scuttlebutt has Rick Perry, the Energy secretary who took the job not knowing what the Department of Energy does, moving to Veterans’ Affairs. As others inevitably follow Tillerson out the door — Jeff Sessions, H.R. McMaster, et al. — we’ll increasingly see successors like Pompeo, picked from within the current ranks of administration flunkies.

Tea Party "movement" which was a Koch brothers' vehicle.

From Greg Sargent

Quote:

Democrats can do better among blue-collar whites. In his speech to supporters last night, Lamb stressed the importance of organized labor to the future of the Democratic Party, spoke up for the value of unions and work, and emphasized the importance of maintaining bedrock programs such as Medicare and Social Security. He had also campaigned against the GOP tax cuts as a giveaway to the rich — and, importantly, blasted the tax cuts for creating deficits that would require deep cuts to entitlements, harming the middle class.

WP

I think this is exactly right. And such a range of traditional Dem policies if bolstered by further appeals to women and youth and minorities ought to get the job done.

And I can't even begin to count up the number of brave Roman's killed by limey criminals throwing bags of Earl Grey over top.

I did not know. But jesus, that is some pedestal our Duke is planted on.

The TEA Party was grass roots.

As luck—or careful, strategic planning—would have it, just such a highly leveraged network with these very pillars was in place as the Tea Party movement appeared to emerge from nowhere at the start of President Obama’s first term in office. That Tea Party movement looked an awful lot like the efforts the Kochs’ CSE had led in the Clinton and Bush years—just with more money, broad state-based causes, better-trained leaders, and a willingness to integrate and coordinate more efficiently with each other.

According to publicly available IRS records, the five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009—the Sam Adams Alliance to direct grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to direct propaganda efforts in state capitals across the United States; the State Policy Network to coordinate funding and free-market policies at state-based think tanks; hundreds of grants from the Koch foundations to American universities that were linked in through SPN; and, of course, CSE’s successor, Americans for Prosperity, built to coordinate the effort nationally.

A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

You need to stop lying.

You really need to do a better job informing yourself about the facts.

Quote:

maybe it'll work
maybe not

It definitely will work if we mean it will influence GOP voters and probably some independents. But it almost certainly won't be anywhere near enough (your example of last night is definitely to the point). It really does look like an enormous wave coming and I don't see how that changes outside of some huge catastrophe that somehow makes Trump look good. But given Trump, what the hell could that be?

You could renominate Hillary Clinton.