When the Republicans stole the White House for at least the second time in 16 years in 2016, many more people rose up against this latest injustice than in 2000. They hit the streets in protests and rallies, organized social media opposition campaigns, wrote guides on how to effectively oppose Republicans at town hall meetings, and took similar actions.
Not Our President: The Movement against the Agenda of Tricky Don & Wingman Mike covers their story. The roughly 55,000-word book written by progressive journalist Jack Thor is being offered by Amazon Digital Services here for just $2.99. It will also be free for five days starting March 1.
The book details what people such as former congressional staffer Ezra Levin and librarian Rebecca McCorkindale are doing to oppose the harmful policies of Donald Trump and Michael Pence, and make a difference to restore confidence and integrity to the U.S. political system. It spins the story forward with recommendations on how readers can aid in this movement, including a list of about 300 resources to check.
“The development of a grassroots movement to oppose the Trump administration is a very important story,” said Jack Thor, 57, a journalist, photographer, and activist for more than three decades. “Many people who were not really involved in politics before have become involved, largely through social media. I know I stepped up my involvement again after the Republicans stole another election.
“This is just too much,” continued Thor. “I was mad as hell about how Bush and the Republicans stole the White House in 2000, but for them to do this again is really a travesty. This is not a petty burglary we’re talking about. This is the theft of one of the most cherished institutions our country has, done right before all of our own eyes once again. And we just let them get away with it. Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, and others are probably still rolling over in their graves. If you can fix an election like this, you can fix almost anything.”
While many – including Trump − harped on the snafu at the Oscars in February 26 that named the wrong best picture, Thor was struck more by how much more care goes into making sure that the correct Academy Award winner was named than the correct U.S. president was named. A February 27 story in The Guardian details how PriceWaterhouseCoopers officials not only count votes of the 7,000 Academy members electronically, but they do paper and manual hand recounts.
Meanwhile, many states do not even have paper ballots to recount anymore for president. And, as Thor’s book shows, Republicans blocked hand recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania late in 2016, the same way they blocked hand recounts in Florida in 2000. “Americans care more about getting an overly glorified award right than they do about the president,” Thor charged. “There should be a law that every state in which the vote is within 3 percentage points has to go through a manual, hand recount. But even when there are legal challenges, Republicans block more careful recounts. More than 1 million votes were not even counted, due to Republican voter suppression tactics, in 2016. If it takes a few weeks to count these votes, we should do it. We should get the right damned president.”
Backed up with hundreds of footnotes and sources that are linked to Internet pages, Not Our President starts by outlining how Trump and the Republicans employed questionable actions to win key swing states. Those included purging legal voters from the rolls, using state offices for political purposes, giving voters misleading instructions, approving confusing ballots, questionable decisions that favored Republicans by partisan judges, hacking into Democrats’ email systems by Russians, the conspiracy by the FBI to release the “October Surprise,” and more.
The book goes on to detail what organizations like the ACLU, social media activists, and politicians like U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., are doing to restore confidence in the White House and U.S. electoral system. It includes recommendations for further action from people like Michael Moore, Robert Reich, Angela Davis, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Barbra Streisand, and U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.
While the subject matter is serious, Thor injects humor throughout the book, such as his suggestion that Saturday Night Live portray Steve Bannon as Peter Pan and Trump as Tinker Bell since Bannon particularly relishes the darker portrayals. Some compare Trump to Hitler, which Thor believes is too dark. Nixon is a better comparison, thus the Tricky Don moniker.
Jack Thor’s past books include Born to Cheat: How Bush, Cheney, Rove & Co. Broke the Rules - From the Sandlot to the White House [2007], The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush & Other Things the Bush Administration Doesn’t Want You to Know [2004], and We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House [2002].
His essays and columns have appeared in numerous ezines and blogs, including Oped News, Daily Kos, Smirking Chimp, Democrats.com, American Politics Journal, Online Journal, Buzzflash, AlterNet, BushWatch, Liberal Slant, MikeHersh.com, Information Clearinghouse, Znet, Dream Forge, Moderate Independent, IndyMedia, America Held Hostile, Global Free Press, and Democratic Underground.
Conservative talk show host Rush “Fat Bastard” Limbaugh once called him a “liar” on his show, probably in reference to Thor calling Limbaugh “the biggest lying, Dominican Republic-underaged-girl-screwing sack of shit that ever got on the air.” Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry once said he should suffer and initiated an investigation of him after he wrote about alleged homosexual activity of Trump’s energy czar. Thor once debated G. Gordon Liddy about the First Amendment and other issues on the Watergate crook’s radio show while driving his car 80 miles an hour through rural Tennessee.
Some stories he has broken include Dick Cheney continuing to live in his Texas home after he claimed to have moved to Wyoming and selling the home to a big Republican donor who already had a mansion in the same neighborhood. He was the last writer to interview Margie Schoedinger, a Texas woman who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against George W. Bush and died via a gunshot wound that was ruled a suicide a few months later.
When conservatives claimed that not even liberal types would defend actor Chevy Chase calling Bush a “dumb fuck” in public, Thor did just that, showing how Bush and Cheney had used profanity in public repeatedly. His reports on Arnold Schwarznegger – who he has come to actually admire in an odd way − and others were so revealing that the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and others called to follow up.
Thor has also strayed into political activism at times. In 2003, he organized a petition drive to oust former hard right-winger Tom DeLay from office and presented copies of the petition signed by several thousand fellow Americans to the offices of leaders of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Others did likewise, and the efforts helped lead to DeLay’s ouster and conviction.
In addition, Thor has had photographs and poetry published. After the latest Republican theft, he shortened his name from “Jackson Thoreau” to “Jack Thor” to make it flashier and more pointed. The name is a pseudonym taken from a combination of a late dog and one of his favorite writers.
“In this way, my dog still lives to do some noble, important deeds,” Thor said. “Thoreau was a writer who did a lot more than just write about problems in society in the 1800s; he worked for solutions. He helped start a school that did not practice corporal punishment and took students on field trips. He was active in the anti-slavery, transcendental, environmental, and other movements of his day. If Thoreau was alive today, I think he would have written books and columns like I have. I think he would be on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressors.”
The author can be contacted through email at jacksonthor@gmail.com . His twitter feed is twitter.com/jackthor44 and Facebook page is www.facebook.com/jackthor44.
Table of Contents of Not Our President
Introduction
Chapter One: How We Got Into This Mess
Chapter Two: What We Are Up Against
Chapter Three: ‘It’s Now or Never’
Chapter Four: The Battle on Social Media
Chapter Five: Inauguration Fireworks
Chapter Six: Nixon 2.0
Chapter Seven: Government by Extreme Executive Order
Chapter Eight: What We Can Continue To Do About It
Conclusion
Appendix: Notes, Resources, Acknowledgments, About the Author
Not Our President: The Movement against the Agenda of Tricky Don & Wingman Mike covers their story. The roughly 55,000-word book written by progressive journalist Jack Thor is being offered by Amazon Digital Services here for just $2.99. It will also be free for five days starting March 1.
The book details what people such as former congressional staffer Ezra Levin and librarian Rebecca McCorkindale are doing to oppose the harmful policies of Donald Trump and Michael Pence, and make a difference to restore confidence and integrity to the U.S. political system. It spins the story forward with recommendations on how readers can aid in this movement, including a list of about 300 resources to check.
“The development of a grassroots movement to oppose the Trump administration is a very important story,” said Jack Thor, 57, a journalist, photographer, and activist for more than three decades. “Many people who were not really involved in politics before have become involved, largely through social media. I know I stepped up my involvement again after the Republicans stole another election.
“This is just too much,” continued Thor. “I was mad as hell about how Bush and the Republicans stole the White House in 2000, but for them to do this again is really a travesty. This is not a petty burglary we’re talking about. This is the theft of one of the most cherished institutions our country has, done right before all of our own eyes once again. And we just let them get away with it. Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, and others are probably still rolling over in their graves. If you can fix an election like this, you can fix almost anything.”
While many – including Trump − harped on the snafu at the Oscars in February 26 that named the wrong best picture, Thor was struck more by how much more care goes into making sure that the correct Academy Award winner was named than the correct U.S. president was named. A February 27 story in The Guardian details how PriceWaterhouseCoopers officials not only count votes of the 7,000 Academy members electronically, but they do paper and manual hand recounts.
Meanwhile, many states do not even have paper ballots to recount anymore for president. And, as Thor’s book shows, Republicans blocked hand recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania late in 2016, the same way they blocked hand recounts in Florida in 2000. “Americans care more about getting an overly glorified award right than they do about the president,” Thor charged. “There should be a law that every state in which the vote is within 3 percentage points has to go through a manual, hand recount. But even when there are legal challenges, Republicans block more careful recounts. More than 1 million votes were not even counted, due to Republican voter suppression tactics, in 2016. If it takes a few weeks to count these votes, we should do it. We should get the right damned president.”
Backed up with hundreds of footnotes and sources that are linked to Internet pages, Not Our President starts by outlining how Trump and the Republicans employed questionable actions to win key swing states. Those included purging legal voters from the rolls, using state offices for political purposes, giving voters misleading instructions, approving confusing ballots, questionable decisions that favored Republicans by partisan judges, hacking into Democrats’ email systems by Russians, the conspiracy by the FBI to release the “October Surprise,” and more.
The book goes on to detail what organizations like the ACLU, social media activists, and politicians like U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., are doing to restore confidence in the White House and U.S. electoral system. It includes recommendations for further action from people like Michael Moore, Robert Reich, Angela Davis, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Barbra Streisand, and U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.
While the subject matter is serious, Thor injects humor throughout the book, such as his suggestion that Saturday Night Live portray Steve Bannon as Peter Pan and Trump as Tinker Bell since Bannon particularly relishes the darker portrayals. Some compare Trump to Hitler, which Thor believes is too dark. Nixon is a better comparison, thus the Tricky Don moniker.
Jack Thor’s past books include Born to Cheat: How Bush, Cheney, Rove & Co. Broke the Rules - From the Sandlot to the White House [2007], The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush & Other Things the Bush Administration Doesn’t Want You to Know [2004], and We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House [2002].
His essays and columns have appeared in numerous ezines and blogs, including Oped News, Daily Kos, Smirking Chimp, Democrats.com, American Politics Journal, Online Journal, Buzzflash, AlterNet, BushWatch, Liberal Slant, MikeHersh.com, Information Clearinghouse, Znet, Dream Forge, Moderate Independent, IndyMedia, America Held Hostile, Global Free Press, and Democratic Underground.
Conservative talk show host Rush “Fat Bastard” Limbaugh once called him a “liar” on his show, probably in reference to Thor calling Limbaugh “the biggest lying, Dominican Republic-underaged-girl-screwing sack of shit that ever got on the air.” Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry once said he should suffer and initiated an investigation of him after he wrote about alleged homosexual activity of Trump’s energy czar. Thor once debated G. Gordon Liddy about the First Amendment and other issues on the Watergate crook’s radio show while driving his car 80 miles an hour through rural Tennessee.
Some stories he has broken include Dick Cheney continuing to live in his Texas home after he claimed to have moved to Wyoming and selling the home to a big Republican donor who already had a mansion in the same neighborhood. He was the last writer to interview Margie Schoedinger, a Texas woman who filed a sexual assault lawsuit against George W. Bush and died via a gunshot wound that was ruled a suicide a few months later.
When conservatives claimed that not even liberal types would defend actor Chevy Chase calling Bush a “dumb fuck” in public, Thor did just that, showing how Bush and Cheney had used profanity in public repeatedly. His reports on Arnold Schwarznegger – who he has come to actually admire in an odd way − and others were so revealing that the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and others called to follow up.
Thor has also strayed into political activism at times. In 2003, he organized a petition drive to oust former hard right-winger Tom DeLay from office and presented copies of the petition signed by several thousand fellow Americans to the offices of leaders of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Others did likewise, and the efforts helped lead to DeLay’s ouster and conviction.
In addition, Thor has had photographs and poetry published. After the latest Republican theft, he shortened his name from “Jackson Thoreau” to “Jack Thor” to make it flashier and more pointed. The name is a pseudonym taken from a combination of a late dog and one of his favorite writers.
“In this way, my dog still lives to do some noble, important deeds,” Thor said. “Thoreau was a writer who did a lot more than just write about problems in society in the 1800s; he worked for solutions. He helped start a school that did not practice corporal punishment and took students on field trips. He was active in the anti-slavery, transcendental, environmental, and other movements of his day. If Thoreau was alive today, I think he would have written books and columns like I have. I think he would be on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressors.”
The author can be contacted through email at jacksonthor@gmail.com . His twitter feed is twitter.com/jackthor44 and Facebook page is www.facebook.com/jackthor44.
Table of Contents of Not Our President
Introduction
Chapter One: How We Got Into This Mess
Chapter Two: What We Are Up Against
Chapter Three: ‘It’s Now or Never’
Chapter Four: The Battle on Social Media
Chapter Five: Inauguration Fireworks
Chapter Six: Nixon 2.0
Chapter Seven: Government by Extreme Executive Order
Chapter Eight: What We Can Continue To Do About It
Conclusion
Appendix: Notes, Resources, Acknowledgments, About the Author
Looks really detailed, a lot of work! Congrats! I will check it out....
ReplyDelete'Preciate it!
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