In the movie Thank You For Smoking, the main character Joey Naylor, a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, has a great scene with his son that talks about how he wins. 

His son asks him what happens when he’s wrong. Here’s the quick transcript of the scene: 

Joey Naylor: What happens when you’re wrong? Nick Naylor: Whoa, Joey I’m never wrong.
Joey Naylor: But you can’t always be right…
Nick Naylor: Well, if it’s your job to be right, then you’re never wrong.
Joey Naylor: But what if you are wrong?
Nick Naylor: OK, let’s say that you’re defending chocolate, and I’m defending vanilla. Now if I were to say to you: ‘Vanilla is the best flavour ice-cream’, you’d say…
Joey Naylor: No, chocolate is.
Nick Naylor: Exactly, but you can’t win that argument… so, I’ll ask you: so you think chocolate is the end all and the all of ice-cream, do you?
Joey Naylor: It’s the best ice-cream, I wouldn’t order any other.
Nick Naylor: Oh! So it’s all chocolate for you is it?
Joey Naylor: Yes, chocolate is all I need.
Nick Naylor: Well, I need more than chocolate, and for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom. And choice when it comes to our ice-cream, and that Joey Naylor, that is the defintion of liberty.
Joey Naylor: But that’s not what we’re talking about
Nick Naylor: Ah! But that’s what I’m talking about.
Joey Naylor: …but you didn’t prove that vanilla was the best…
Nick Naylor: I didn’t have to. I proved that you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong I’m right.
Joey Naylor: But you still didn’t convince me
Nick Naylor: It’s that I’m not after you. I’m after them. [points into the crowd]

This scene illustrates one of the greatest issues that I see liberals struggle with in the public sphere: 

We think we win when we win a logical argument.

Professionals like Nick Naylor understand that you win when you win someone over. 

While many eyes (and with justification!) are already on the 2018 midterm elections, it is worth noting that some very important elections on the statewide level are on tap for this November. So, it is fair to say that the first chance to assess the electoral impact of Donald Trump will come in just nine short months.

The two states that headline the 2017 election cycle are two states that, on the surface, did not seem to change much in 2016.

Virginia, which arguably will get the most attention in this off-year cycle, went from a 3.9 point victory for Barack Obama in 2012 to a 5.3 point win for Hillary Clinton this past year. Meanwhile, New Jersey moved marginally in the direction of the GOP, with an 17-point Obama win in 2012 to a 14-point Clinton win in 2016. Beneath the surface, however, there were some much more substantial shifts on a more granular level. It might surprise folks to learn, for example, that there were legislative districts in Virginia that shifted more than 20 points in either direction between 2012-2016. Quite a few of those “big-shift” districts, in fact, are likely to be pivotal to any shifts in the outsized Republican legislative majority in the House of Delegates in the state.

New Jersey, meanwhile, had a smaller number of large shifts, but that is owed in part to the fact that there are far fewer districts (40) in the state than there are in Virginia (where there are 100 districts in the lower chamber). Still, there are a handful of districts where the size of the shift could surely matter. New Jersey is the converse of Virginia—there, any movement is likely to benefit the GOP. 

The bottom line is that, in both cases, more than one-quarter of the state’s legislative districts shifted far more substantially than the state at large. And those shifts could (repeat: could) result in large changes to the legislative balance of power.

The hits just keep on coming:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

The players involved are a who’s who of Trump-connected pro-Russian figures.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul D. Manafort.

Cohen is under investigation by the FBI as part of the query into Russian influence in Trump's election; Sater is Mafia-linked. A key part of the plan, led by pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Artemenko, would be releasing alleged evidence of corruption by the current not-pro-Russian-enough Ukrainian leader, thus allowing fine men like Andrii Artemenko to take over the government and negotiate a long term Russian "lease" of Crimea, and so forth. (Artemenko even offered up that he had “received encouragement for his plans from top aides to Mr. Putin”, which is apparently something would-be government topplers are willing to brag about these days.)

The end result: If the current Ukrainian government was disposed of and a more Russia-tolerant faction took its place, thus achieving a peace with Russia that may or may not absolve Russia of their military invasion and capture of Crimea, than the way would be clear for the Trump administration to lift the sanctions on Russia that resulted.

Which would, in turn, allow deals like now-Secretary-of-State Rex Tillerson's $500 billion oil deal between ExxonMobil and Russia to go forward.

All it requires is a more complaint Ukrainian government, with the assistance of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Paul Manafort’s pals. This is an actual plan these people were willing to put down on paper.

Here’s what CNN reporter Zachary Wollf recently said when describing why it’s hard to cover Donald Trump: "What does it mean when he says words?”

Clearly, Trump doesn’t mean what he’s actually saying. Facts are optional. They are fungible.  \For example his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, is advertised as being 68 stories tall, but in reality is only 58 stories high. Select floors are missing in order for them to claim the 45th floor is really the 53rd floor—and get a much higher rate of return than he normally would when leasing office space or condos. This is just a perfect example of Trump’s reality warping field in effect. Things aren’t what they truly are: they are what Trump claims they are. This may be one of the key sources of Trump’s ability to succeed against all reasonable odds. 

It’s also why his efforts are ultimately doomed to failure.

Today was a slow day on the nation's Sunday Shows, thanks to the either intentional or unintentional absence of each of the Trump administration's most dedicated and egregious liars. Perhaps they were tuckered out, or perhaps nausea has set in at the various networks and they've decided that even if their viewers don't necessarily deserve a break from the authoritarian Dear Leaderisms of a Kellyanne or the stubborn Sean insistence on alternative facts, the cameras themselves can only take so much. Regardless, it was up to White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to make the rounds, artfully shedding whatever stray scraps of dignity that still clung to him after a half-year of toadying up to, objectively, the worst man he's ever worked for.

So Reince obligingly went out and did all the lying on his own.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday flatly denied any involvement between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian officials. [...]

Priebus said he’s spoken with high-level intelligence officials in Washington who have told him that no such involvement occurred.

Which directly contradicts multiple reports of exactly that involvement taking place.

His main task, however, was to confirm that when Donald Trump said that our nation's free press was "the enemy" of the American people, he meant it.

"I think you should take it seriously. I think that the problem we've got is that we're talking about bogus stories like the one in the New York Times, that we've had constant contact with Russian officials. The next day, the Wall Street Journal had a story that the intel community was not giving the president a full intelligence briefing," Priebus said. "Both stories grossly inaccurate, overstated, overblown, and it's total garbage."

Over the past week, the White House has been completely overwhelmed by the Trump administration’s mushrooming medley of Moscow outrages. But to what Vox labeled the “3 Trump-Russia Scandals”—potential Trump collusion with Russia against the Hillary Clinton campaign, possible Trump lies about Michael Flynn’s outreach to the Putin government, and purported kompromat Russian intelligence may be holding over the American president—must be added a fourth: What are the conflicts of interest created by the Trump Organization’s extensive business ties to Putin’s kleptocratic petro-state?

With the Trump empire cut off by American banks, the family business has become dependent on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and investors from Russia. As Donald Trump, Jr. summed up in 2008:

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

That alone provides one powerful reason why President Trump must release his tax returns to the American people. It’s not just a matter of following four decades of presidential practice. Simply put, we need to know if our president is being paid in rubles.

But there’s another reason President Trump must come clean about his finances. In recent days, Trump has promised he will soon unveil a “phenomenal” tax reform plan that calls for “lowering the overall tax burden of American businesses, big league.” But that isn’t the only promise The Donald has made to American taxpayers about his reform scheme. The self-proclaimed "voice" of "the forgotten men and women of our country”—the same man praised by family and friends as a “blue-collar billionaire”—made this pledge last year:

"It reduces or eliminates most of the deductions and loopholes available to special interests and to the very rich. In other words, it's going to cost me a fortune -- which is actually true -- while preserving charitable giving and mortgage interest deductions, very importantly." [Emphasis mine.]

To which the only appropriate response to the pathological liar-in-chief is: “Prove it.”

On Friday, members of the Senate Intelligence committee received a classified briefing on the investigation into Russian interference in the November election from FBI Director James Comey. It was notable primarily for the stone-faced silence with which senators sidled by the press after the meeting.

That same evening, though, the committee took action.

The Senate intelligence committee has sent formal requests to more than a dozen organizations, agencies and individuals, asking them to preserve all materials related to a probe the panel is conducting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and related issues, a congressional aide said Saturday.

Among those "related issues": Alleged contact during the campaign between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence figures, as well as conversations between now-resigned Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador.

As for what the move "means", it means that the committee does indeed expect to delve into Russian interference and what various agencies and individuals did or did not know. As for how seriously the Republican-led committee truly presses? We don't know.

It took Richard Nixon more than two years to own up to the Watergate scandal. Facing impeachment, he resigned, and top aides spent time in jail. Ronald Reagan’s administration traded arms to Iran for the release of a few American hostages in 1985, using profits from those arms sales to fund a war in Nicaragua, and it took several years and three investigations to unravel the whole mess. Reagan escaped direct punishment for the Iran-Contra affair, but several on his team were convicted (and pardoned by Reagan’s successor).

It has taken Donald Trump less than one month for his administration to be embroiled in a scandal that’s just as bad—and perhaps much worse.

No one knows when we’ll get the full story about the Russian infiltration that reached high levels and inner circles of both the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. The scandal combines the power-grabbing paranoia of Watergate (interfering with an election, this time by a foreign power) with the illegal foreign policy workarounds of Iran-Contra (calling a Russian ambassador with inside info, and who knows what else).

Legendary newsman Dan Rather says Trump’s Russia scandal could end up being as bad as Watergate. “It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged,” Rather wrote on a Facebook post that quickly went viral. On his Meet the Press Daily show, NBC’s Chuck Todd said, “Welcome to Day One of what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra,” further describing it as a “class-five political hurricane that’s hitting Washington.”

Three scandals of different magnitudes, with different details. What do they have in common?

Lady Liberty is in an abusive relationship with Uncle Sam.

Try as she might to break the hold that he has on her, she remains tormented by his maltreatment, but is bound by years of tradition and obligation, and unable to imagine a life independent of him. Though he’s raped and beaten her repeatedly, she finds a way to convince herself that he has redeeming qualities, along with a seemingly endless supply of second chances. She tells herself things will get better if only she could give him precisely what he wants, no matter how incongruent it may be with her safety or peace of mind. Despite her best efforts, he remains disgruntled and dissatisfied, and the abuse continues with very little hope of mitigation, and absolute certainty of escalation.

As we watch the disastrous dysfunction of Donald Trump’s first 30 days in office unfold, it becomes ever more apparent that we as a nation are already deep in the throes of an unhealthy relationship with a president and party that are hellbent on our oppression. In other words, welcome to Stockholm syndrome on a national scale.

America preaches the virtues of democracy, meritocracy, and fairness. They say anyone who works hard has equal access to success in this country. But it turns out that’s not the case.

Hillary Clinton was the most qualified candidate running in the 2016 election, bar none. Several million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than they did for Donald Trump. And yet she lost the Electoral College. Donald Trump did everything humanly possible to lose the election—yet he won.

Millions of Americans called their senators, imploring them not to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary. Who is Betsy DeVos? She is a wealthy Michigan politico who spends her days lobbying Congress to dismantle the public school system and install a “voucher system” in its place.

Over the last few days, many of us residing in my Houston-area school district have been seeking out candidates to run for our local school board. The current group making decisions for the Humble Independent School District is an ALEC-driven board that recently installed Elizabeth Fagen, the failed former superintendent of Douglas County, Colorado, at the helm. Most of the district's parents were against the appointment. Many parents and students rallied and conducted several well-designed protests at the district's headquarters. They attended the school board meetings. They spoke. They made their points with researched data. But the board ignored them and put the district under the control of someone who does not have the best interest of public schools in mind.

America is at a crossroads. On issue after issue, Americans are deceived by politicians not honoring their promises or effecting their will. The calls, emails, faxes, and protests do not seem to make a difference. Is it all for naught? Yes, it is—if we don't change the paradigm.

The presidency of popular vote loser Donald Trump is now one month old. There have been a few hiccups—if hiccups mean mind-bogglingly stupid missteps that demonstrate exactly what an in-over-his-head amateur Trump actually is. By comparison, the Trump Administration thus far has made Wile E. Coyote actually look like the Super Genius he sometimes claims to be.

Other presidents have had problems getting their nominees confirmed by the Senate, although it really is satisfying to watch the implosion of Andy Puzder, a nominee to run the Labor Department who has a record of holding laborers in contempt—the human ones, at least. However, if that had been Trump’s biggest problem, he’d be on par with his predecessors. It wasn’t.

Let’s start with the fact—pun intended—that this president and his surrogates have been caught in so many lies that the media, as Amanda Marcotte explains, is grappling with how to cover them without also amplifying them. We’ve all heard that 1984 is back on the best seller list, but don’t forget the specifics of what that book described: a regime that could proclaim that 2+2=5 and make you believe it. While Trump can’t punish you for not believing the sun was shining when it was actually raining, he certainly has no compunction about proclaiming such a thing—even though you can watch a video that shows otherwise. Having a president that divorced from reality causes real trauma.

As President’s Day rolls around again this year, many schools around the nation will continue to embellish and whitewash the mythology of George Washington, the so-called “Father of our Country.” Several years ago, I wrote a response to this burnishing of his image in “George Washington is not my 'Great White Father'” wherein I discussed his history as a slaveholder. Since that time new research has been published by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, professor of Black American studies and history at the University of Delaware. It should be read by anyone seeking a view of American history through the eyes of the enslaved, rather than solely through the perspective of the enslavers and their apologist biographers. 

Armstrong Dunbar’s book is Never Caught. The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked it all to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom. When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital, after a brief stay in New York. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.