Here's the transcript with the full context pic.twitter.com/wERLX8pNM8
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) October 28, 2016
Here's video of that Duckworth/Kirk exchange. It's as bad as it sounds. https://t.co/aC8ahtFalo
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) October 28, 2016
The entire Republican party has lost their god damned minds.
Baud
I wonder how Trump became their nominee.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Hoping Trump completely destroys this party. Bunch of useless fuckwads.
dr. bloor
If it was possible to convey the smell of flop sweat through the internetz, I would no doubt be opening my windows right now to get rid of the stench in my living room.
Character will out. Every. Fucking. Time.
amk
and this one is considered as a ‘moderate’ rethug.
Mary G
Seriously? That was his whole answer? He can kiss his seat goodbye, then.
What a great answer by Tammy, though.
ETA: From Wikipedia (won’t link in edit):
Her American father, who died in 2005,[3] was a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who traced his family’s American roots to before the Revolutionary War.
Anne Laurie
I’m sure Trump’s soon-to-be-burgeoning media empire will find a cushy spot for Mark “One Drop” Kirk, just as soon as he finishes getting his arse kicked by the woman warrior.
SiubhanDuinne
Jesus.
lollipopguild
@Baud: Trump is the next logical step down into the cesspool that the GOP has been turning itself into for 40 years. Create your own reality and then go live there with all of your right wing friends. They feel that the only way to be “free” is to turn America into a Right-Wing dictatorship where they get everything that they want. “Freedom!”
redshirt
Quack quack motherfucker.
Baud
Holy cow. The video is much worse than the transcript.
Pogonip
What a jerk. (Kirk.)
Cole, speaking of jerks, what did they do to the one who nearly starved poor Walter to death? I hope they threw the book at him.
Redshift
@Baud:
It’s such a mystery. The media tell me he made a “hostile takeover” of the GOP.
Bobby Thomson
In all fairness, Kirk probably isn’t used to family trees that have more than one branch.
Party of Trump, indeed.
hovercraft
Every time, dammit, every goddamn time you think there must be some humanity in these people they prove once again that they are simply shitstains.
Mary G
@Baud: True. The contempt in his voice is shocking and you can tell the moderator is going WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK, DUDE for a second.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bobby Thomson: Sick burn.
cynthia ackerman
What a flaming prick. Kirk, Roger Stone, Ailes, and Donald Dump are peas in a pod — boorish horny authoritarians.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I’m just starting to calm down from the verdict delivered in the last thread.
I’m afraid to watch the video. I can’t even listen to Kirk (my senator, ugh) and I am distraught at even the possibility that he could win. We have our terrible evil R governor that I thought surely couldn’t win, so I no longer trust my instincts on who can get elected in IL.
Short summary of he said, she said?
hovercraft
@efgoldman:
He was a dead man walking, this will ensure that he never gets elected dogcatcher anywhere in the future.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Stop tempting me to watch the video!
WaterGirl
@Bobby Thomson:
Thanks for the laugh!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So Kirk basically admitted his family never done military service?
Mnemosyne
Although I am (AFAIK) 100 percent Caucasian, I have a similar family tree to Duckworth’s — paternal grandfather came here from Italy in 1902, maternal grandfather traces back to the Mayflower. My name IRL is 100 percent Italian, so people are sometimes confused when I talk about the Mayflower side.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: So what if his family hasn’t?
hovercraft
@cynthia ackerman:
Well Trump hinted that he may be suing NBC for the Access Hollywood tape because that was illegal what they did, having the mic on and releasing the tape. He also said that he won the third debate in all the polls, and then CNN had a poll that showed he didn’t, and then all of the “dirty polls” said he didn’t win.
chopper
what an unredeemable shithead.
his tears will be extra sweet and delicious 11/9.
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman: Yes, I hope so as well. (Should’ve used the /snark tag.)
smintheus
It’s like that last table off in the corner at the wedding banquet where they decided to isolate the jerk cousin nobody can stand to be around. And then they thought that would be a little too obvious if he was there all by himself, so they decided to stick the nice, mature friend who gets along with everyone next to him. And ten minutes in to the meal she has already realized that she can’t possibly get along with him and needs to just stop responding to the d!ckish things he keeps saying.
Baud
@hovercraft: Maybe he meant dirty Poles.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: Never mind. Just watched it. Wow. He’s a smarmy little prick, isn’t he?
These guys do not like losing to “uppity” women. Elizabeth Warren. Tammy Duckworth. Hillary Clinton.
hovercraft
@Mary G: How long before the walk back?
Jeffro
Glad he’s on his way out.
It does bring to mind a (obviously rhetorical) question: do none of these clowns have the brains or work ethic or class or temperament or even just a basic interest in taking a Dem on about the actual issue at hand on any given day, in any given debate? (note these were all “or”s – I’m not asking for much here)
I guess it’s a chicken-or-the-egg kind of thing…are they mean and stupid because they’re lazy, or are they lazy because they’re mean and stupid?
Karen S.
The look on Kirk’s face when he says it. He looks so smug and like he’s just said something oh so clever. What a dick. I live in Chicago and I’ve already voted for Tammy, and I’m so glad I did.
hovercraft
@Baud:
Nah, he had them all deported when they finished building his tower.
CarolDuhart2
@WaterGirl: One problem is that we tune out the midterm elections. Once we realize that democracy is not just every 4 years, and for President, we could permanently retire a lot of GOP assholes.
WaterGirl
@hovercraft: He often walks back his crazy-speak, so I predict not long. Perhaps his comment will have been taken out of context???
What I sometimes wonder is if he was always this much of a cretin or if his stroke affected his mental state and his judgment.
Gravenstone
The words of someone so steeped in his white male privilege that he thinks it beneath him to even have to defend his position against a woman, let alone one not of undiluted European ancestry. Kirk is scared and pissed off because not only does he indeed have to defend that position, he knows he’s losing.
Lizzy L
Aw, poor boy. Tammy Duckworth is cleaning his clock, and he can’t handle it. I checked FiveThirtyEight: the numbers for the projected vote share are 53% to 43%. The racist p**ck is LOSING.
dr. bloor
@efgoldman: Yeah, he’s been a dead man running for a while now. This was just an elegant demonstration of the Republican interpretation of “grace under pressure.”
Mary G
@WaterGirl: Exactly as written in the tweet above, she gives the answer about her family’s military service, the moderator gives Kirk 30 seconds to respond. then Kirk says that one sentence in a contemptuous tone. The moderator kind of stares at him for a second, then rattled, because he thought he had 30 seconds, looks at his papers and says, well, the next question is…
If Hillary doesn’t have this up in a commercial demanding Trump denounce this by tomorrow, I will eat my hat.
amygdala
The transcript is bad; the video is orders of magnitude worse. Good grief.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Omnes Omnibus:
That reads like Duckworth was accusing him of being a Chicken Hawk and that dig at her was the “f – you, for being right”.
debbie
Hope there’s time to get an ad out on this.
Bill E Pilgrim
I guess that’s not new but I just saw it.
hovercraft
@Karen S.:
I suspect that the jackass is such an ignoramus that he probably didn’t know that her father was “American”, he probably thought her family immigrated here.
Mary G
@CarolDuhart2: I am hoping that along with their redistricting work, President Obama and Attorney General Holder start a massive GOTV for 2018 on Jan. 21, 2017.
Jeffro
@CarolDuhart2:
Post-president (or should I say pre-post-president) PBO is already on this, by trying to make Election Day a national holiday. It’s a small thing but if it were an annual reminder (instead of a quadrennial ‘oh yeah, that’s right, I probably should go vote’ kind of thing) it might help build the habit.
Looking forward to a “bring your kids to the (voting) booth!” campaign, too. My kids have come with me every election since before they could even walk and they can’t believe anyone wouldn’t make this their #1 priority every election day.
OGLiberal
And Kirk is about as moderate and as decent a GOPer you’ll get in this bunch. What does that say? Can we make fun of his stroke?
As time goes by, as bad as he was, I think Boehner may have been tbe best of the bunch. I think his tears were genuine and the result of a “why the frack did I want this?” realization. He got out because he was tired of the loonies and saw this s**t show coming. And now he’s sitting back smoking a cig, drinking Scotch, and laughing at wonderboy Ryan’s predicament.
Or he’s a high paid lobbyist…I have no idea.
Omnes Omnibus
@amygdala: Co-sign. Didn’t his people do oppo work?
debbie
They just ran an ad for Ted Strickland that included Obama talking about why he supports Ted. Interesting that so many ads are coming out after the DNC pulled out of that race.
Jeffro
@Lizzy L: Good! If there’s any leftover cash in Duckworth’s account come mid-November, or in Hillz’, maybe they should run a PSA of sorts: “This is why this jerkwad lost: it’s not hard to be decent and stick to the actual issues…unless you’re Mark Kirk, or really any Republican, I guess”.
/fantasyland
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Nah, I just saw flat-out, ignorant racism.
amk
any recent polling on this dipshit’s chances? per rcp, the last polling was done nearly a month ago, in which duckworth was leading by +14.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: Duh. I missed the transcript!
Zippity
@Karen S.: I voted for her yesterday, Thought it was appropriate to vote on Hillary’s birthday. Dems all the way down. I cannot believe the amount of money Rauner financed groups are spending on the state house seats in my area.
khead
@Baud:
Like some kind of reverse mic drop. Or maybe a 45 single being scratched from start to finish. And not in a cool, hippity-hoppity sorta way.
WaterGirl
@Bill E Pilgrim: Wow, Trump was a lot more sane back then. He could mostly speak in complete sentences and his affect was completely different. I wonder what happened.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim: He still sniffles.
Mary G
Ed Kilgore wrote this about the state of the Senate races:
So Tammy’s got this one and we need to get Murphy, Cortez-Masto, Hassan. Ross, and McGinty over the line. Four out of five are women, but I would add Kandar in Missouri. The last poll of that race is a tie, per RCP.
I’m already over my October budget, but I’m taking money out of savings and sending each of them $25. I cancelled my ongoing contribution to Hillary, because she has enough money and votes.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@OGLiberal:
Boehner was worse than the Tea Party. They didn’t have the power to obstruct jack shit without him abusing his powers as Speaker in ways no Speaker ever has before. Even Hastert didn’t actually use the Hastert Rule, and without Boehner’s even-more-draconian version of it the Tea Party would have been a helpless rump as Democrats and moderate (merely asshole) Republicans passed basic legislation. He was the Teabaggers’ best friend, and all they gave him for it was shit.
Omnes Omnibus
What do you have against Feingold?
hovercraft
@WaterGirl:
She’s in his way, anyone who gets between him and something he wants, watch out. As long as you are “nice” to him, he will be nice to you. The exception is the blah people, the Central Park Five and Obama never attacked him but he went after them to raise his profile.
khead
Also, with respect to the NFL, someone needs to fire Gus Bradley and the person who is responsible for the uniforms tonight.
JanieM
@Mnemosyne: Wow, that’s pretty close to my details as well. My paternal grandfather came in 1902 on a ship called the Gallia — I have screenshots of the ship manifest from ellisisland.org. He was about 10 years old at the time. My paternal grandmother came, as far as we can tell, a few years later. She grew up in Brooklyn, he grew up in the Ohio town where I also grew up; theirs was an arranged marriage.
Meanwhile, on my mother’s side, there are two lines of ancestry that I have genealogy books for — not Mayflower people as such, but 1637 or so arrival on this continent.
I grew up in the midst of a very wide culture/religion/temperament gap……
What do you call the Mayflower side equivalently to “Italian-American”? I tend to think “old American….”
*****
P.s. [email protected]WaterGirl, I can’t bring myself to watch the video. Does Duckworth or the moderator call him out as the ignorant asshole he is?
rikyrah
Man, I can’t wait to get rid of that muthaphucka.???
JCJ
Just showed the video to my Thai wife and our daughter. These are two pissed off women right now.
Schlemazel
Well they sold their soul to Satan 35 years ago so losing thier mind seems very likely.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jeffro:
I would love to see the first Tuesday after the second Monday of every November made a national holiday. Even in non-Presidential years, the even-numbered are midterms for the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. And in odd-numbered years, several states elect their Governors and state legislators.
I keep thinking of countries in which their citizens have only recently been granted suffrage. They stand in line for hours on end, and proudly display their inked fingers to show they have exercised their right to vote. And we are content with a 60% turnout. Insane.
amygdala
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t know, but I’m imagining Hillary’s team wondering when the embarrassment (pun intended) of ad-worthy video riches will end.
Major Major Major Major
This is the guy who said Duckworth doesn’t “stand up” for our veterans, right?
hueyplong
It’s as though someone advised Kirk that the best way to avoid accusations of misogyny is to hide them under a metric ton of racism.
As GWB might say, Mission Accomplished.
lamh36
@WaterGirl: Do yourselves a favor and reed the responses to a tweet from Kirk…it make you proud of the response so far, even if just ok twitter
https://twitter.com/markkirk/status/791830347092746240
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro:
I bring my daughter whenever I get the chance–she came with me to the primary, and the one thing that made me a little regretful about early voting this year was that the ladies who work the polls might be looking forward to seeing her again in November (but Samantha might take her). When she was a toddler, I walked to the polling place and voted with her riding in a sling on my hip.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
He was always like this.
SiubhanDuinne
@JCJ:
Hope they are both eligible, and motivated, to vote (even if not Illinois).
Redshift
@Jeffro: I think it’s more than a small thing. Contrary to the popular belief in “apathy” or purists abandoning the president, voting participation correlates strongly with income, and Dems are much more dependent on lower income voters. Shifting that curve up even a little would be no small matter.
WaterGirl
@JanieM: The video was only 48 seconds, just shows what a smarmy scumbag Kirk is. Every word from the video is in the transcript at the top of the thread.
Lizzy L
@Jeffro: This. God, yes, this. My parents brought me to the voting booth every election. One of my earliest political memories is watching the 1956 election returns on the television — we got one so that we could watch. My Democratic parents were Stevenson fans. Presidential elections were BFDs in our house, but every election was important. If this country is going to survive as a democracy, we’re going to have to take voting seriously, fight all the efforts to suppress the vote, get out for the midterms — I believe we can do it. We have to. If we don’t, we might as well just cancel the damn elections as Trump wants.
Hob
@JanieM: After Kirk’s remark there was a pause, the moderator seemed to be waiting to see if he had anything else to add but he didn’t, and then they moved on to the next question. Duckworth responded to that bullshit later on Twitter.
Bill E Pilgrim
@WaterGirl: Yeah I mean he was never a genius or highly informed but it’s pretty different from now. His new candidate persona, the whole caveman thing is an act to a great degree, the extreme crudeness and what he sees as toughness, he’s doing it to appeal to people he sees as that way.
I saw an interview from when he was just starting the birther idiocy and he didn’t seem particularly passionate about the issue itself, but at one point added “And you know, people love this issue!” like it was a product he found that sold like crazy, so he was going with it.
He’s always been a racist, clearly, but he’s mostly about being a con man, a grifter, a salesman, more than actually giving a shit about any issues. I think a lot of his personality now is just a sales mask.
rikyrah
@Zippity:
I can. They want to hurt Michael Madigan. While not remotely my favorite person, he is all that has kept us from that cretin Rauner.
JanieM
@WaterGirl: Thanks. I didn’t think I could more flabbergasted.
amygdala
@lamh36: That’s gonna leave a mark. Thanks for the link. I needed a good laugh.
SiubhanDuinne
@Major Major Major Major:
I thought that was the other shitstain, Joe Walsh. Could be wrong. Could be both of them.
Trentrunner
This confuses me: So Duckworth just recounted her military ancestry–in clear, plain English–and then Kirk tries to say Duckworth is lying about having an ancestor in the Revolutionary War? I don’t even get the logic of Kirk’s “burn” here. She had just said she had relatives in the Rev. War. Obvs her mother is from Thailand. Wha…?
Weird.
Princess
@hovercraft: Because Duckworth is such a common Thai name.
WaterGirl
@lamh36: Holy shit-ski, every single comment on Twitter was calling out Kirk. Every single one. Wow. Thanks for that!
P.S. Couldn’t happen to a nicer person. :-)
CarolDuhart2
One reason why voting partcipation goes up with income is that the higher the income, the more control over time you have. Paid days off/leave, flexible working schedules, a 1 income instead of 2 income household where the spouse can go out and vote, ability to get paid childcare.
Can we combine two good concepts and have a Saturday or Friday National Holiday Election Day? Or another Monday Holiday? What do you think about the idea?
Villago Delenda Est
Mark Kirk needs to delete his motherfuckin’ account.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Good to know. I don’t understand how he got elected in the first place. Same for our governor. Ugh.
hovercraft
@JanieM:
Neither, the moderator is stunned, he pauses and then moves on. Tammy knows that he just put another nail in his coffin so she just lets it sit there.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: honestly this would not be the first time I’ve gotten them confused.
ETA: having googled, I now see it was the NRSC.
Omnes Omnibus
@Trentrunner: He can’t see her as other than Asian in ancestry.
Edited to fix a horrible error.
JCJ
@SiubhanDuinne:
Wisconsin. We all voted this afternoon. As I mentioned in an earlier thread it was my wife’s first vote for president since becoming a US citizen. She is all in for Hilz and Feingold.
WaterGirl
Goodnight, all. When your phone battery is down to a thin line of read and your laptop give you the “hey, you have no battery life left” message, it’s time to close up shop for the night.
Mindless TV, here I come!
randy khan
@Mary G:
And she is an actual member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
It’s not their thing, but it would be more than swell if they issued a press release affirming that she’s a member.
Villago Delenda Est
The video is not available anymore. Some outfit called “Advanced Digital Media” has made a copyright claim.
I swear, people like “Advanced Digital Media” have a mission to destroy the concept of copyright entirely.
Smiling Mortician
@lamh36: Those comments are awesome. I like the understated ones: “Whatever is wrong with you, you need to leave the government.”
No shit.
Another Scott
@debbie: I just gave Ted some more money tonight, along with the B-J thermometer and the PEC thermometer. Even though Ted supposedly is behind, I don’t want Portman to win in a squeaker. Nobody knows what turnout is going to be like, in any of these important races. Let’s do what we can to give him, and the rest of them, a fighting chance.
Cheers,
Scott.
hovercraft
@Princess:
Well you know those foreigners can be real crafty with their European last names, English, Spanish who knows which where, it’s all so confusing.
Major Major Major Major
@Omnes Omnibus: I saw that error and was about to say ?
Ian
@WaterGirl:
Maybe being around 52 other lunatics all the time?
Peale
@Redshift: yeah. There are lots of different things that need to be tackled. I do think it’s a good idea to encourage kids to go to the polls. Better yet, bring kids whose parents don’t or can’t vote. It is a habit. One of the weaknesses of the coalition as it stands now is that we have large numbers of people who aren’t in that habit. All the “voting is cool” MTV ads in the world aren’t going to motivate young kids to get to the polls. We also have a lot of naturalized citizen voters and voters whose parents never voted because they weren’t citizens. Also our voters move a lot. I know. I moved ten times in three years to three different states when I got out of college. It was hard to get in the habit of re-registering each time and it didn’t help that if I forgot my voting reminder at home that day, I never knew where I was supposed to vote.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
The women don’t have to be uppity for them to be upset at losing to one. They are throw backs to a shittier time, but same place. They are bigots, in any way which it’s defined. Said another way, they don’t think their shit stinks. But it does. Very, very badly. I hope that they get their asses handed to them. They deserve it, they are giving the rest of us a bad rap. Some of us old white guys are just trying to get along and they are making that extremely difficult, what with them trying to keep white privilege, rich privilege, racism, misogyny, religious bullshit, conservative politics…….
Matt McIrvin
@CarolDuhart2: It just occurred to me, today was the one and only day with late hours for early voting–I didn’t check to see if there was any unusual activity going on around City Hall that would indicate interest. Rotten rainy weather, so maybe not. They will be opening for a while on Saturday at a few places around town.
Edit: Oh, I was wrong–it’s next Thursday, Nov. 3.
hueyplong
I’m assuming the Kenyan Pretender’s jackbooted thugs confiscated all the dog whistles in a horrific violation of the Fourth Amendment, thereby denying the GOP its competitive edge.
Omnes Omnibus
@Major Major Major Major: It was originally longer and then poorly edited. Sort of dodged a bullet there, I hope.
hovercraft
@Ruckus:
Winning is being uppity. Not genuflecting to the men who they are challenging is disrespectful.
Peale
@CarolDuhart2: I’m fine with Saturday. Make it a three day weekend in the fall and 1/2 the state of Wisconsin will don camo and head up north to hunt deer.
Smiling Mortician
@efgoldman: But this ignores the options of lazy and stupid because they’re mean, and also mean and lazy because they’re stupid.
hovercraft
@hueyplong:
We are talking about Illinois, so they are using Chicago thug techniques, not the Kenyan ones.
Omnes Omnibus
@Peale: Outside of bow season, it is blaze orange.
chopper
video link doesn’t work due to a “copyright claim”. any footage i can click on?
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: I think the geographic disruptions that happen to college students are a large part of the problem. It’s all very well to go vote for the first time (if you get the chance) when you turn 18, but then you go to college and you have to either re-register (in a town that might well intentionally make it difficult for you), or vote absentee in your home district. I did the latter through my college years, and I have to admit I didn’t follow local politics back home well enough to cast an informed vote in a lot of the local races.
Then I went to grad school in a different state entirely, and it took a year or two for me to get around to establishing permanent residency in Massachusetts and getting registered to vote there. In the meantime I missed the Silber vs. Weld gubernatorial election. A while back I was trying to remember who I voted for in the 1992 presidential primary, and then I remembered, I didn’t–I was still registered in Virginia and voting absentee, and they had a caucus that year. No way was I making it to that.
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper: The transcript in the FP has the whole exchange.
Pest Bog Mummy, Frakensteinbeck
@hovercraft:
It’s less that the woman is supposed to give up and show deference, and more that she’s supposed to obviously be inferior and above her head. Even worse than challenging their power is challenging their inherent superiority.
Lizzy L
@Matt McIrvin: Don’t most states have Motor Voter Registration, so that you register to vote when you get a driver’s license? That should make a difference to a lot (thought not all) of the college students. It wouldn’t have to me, because I went to college in a city and didn’t have a car, but even in cities with good public transportation, a lot of college students have cars. (Well, maybe not in Boston, or SF, or NY.)
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
i saw the link to the transcript. OTOH i keep hearing about the video, and the look on the moderator’s face. do you have a link?
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: If you have an IL license and go to college in WI, you need to qualify to vote in WI.
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper: I only have what’s in the FP.
Ruckus
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I believe he was hiding it then, now he isn’t. He’s always been a smarmy prick, but like the gop he was better at hiding it. He has lost that filter. He really is a product of the gop for the last 60 yrs (and yes it goes back a lot farther than that, but the last 60 has been more noticeable) or the gop is a product of people like him but with somewhat of a filter. But that has been ripped away over the last 20+ yrs and now it’s easy to see what they really are. This isn’t a sales pitch or a con game, this is the real tRump.
satby
@lamh36: oh man, did you see the reply from Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station?
Peale
@Matt McIrvin: it takes a few years to understand the politics of a place. I didn’t do primaries until I was 30 because I hadn’t really met any of the candidates. When I lived in DC I would vote for Eleanor Holmes Norton because I had met her a few times and liked her, but couldn’t for the life of me know who to vote for in an alderman primary. It was such a mess at the time that I’d just vote against the incumbent knowing that it wouldn’t matter. I can’t see doing that now.
Barbara
@JanieM: In my husband’s family they say first, second or third mayflower. My mother in law’s family came over as merchants, and then to escape the English civil war and Oliver Cromwell. Not all the ships were named mayflower but people know what you mean. In college I had a very elderly professor of French who was an 11th generation descendant of John and Priscilla Alden. He used to talk about his time in Paris “entre les deux guerres” and he was not a snob at all. It’s still funny to me that yes, they were real and they had descendants. Kirk’s statement reeks of the idea that non-European heritage taints any claim to being American.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
then you’re useless. i clearly already read the FP or i wouldn’t have replied to it.
anybody have a working link to the video?
Matt McIrvin
@Lizzy L: Yes–in fact what I think eventually happened was that my Virginia driver’s license expired, and I registered to vote in Massachusetts when I got a new one. But I wasn’t locally registered in the meantime. (I didn’t have a car either, but I did have a license.)
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper:
Just noticing now?
Ruckus
@hovercraft:
You were clearer than me but we are in agreement.
Hob
@chopper: Here you go: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/27/sen-mark-kirk-questions-opponents-american-heritage-in-illinois-debate/
(That’s the 2nd result for a Google search of “Duckworth Kirk debate video”. The 3rd and 4th results also have the same video.)
Hob
Naked link went into moderation, let me try again:
@chopper: Here you go. Google would’ve been faster than asking here, but whatever.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
i keep forgetting.
Omnes Omnibus
@Barbara: The hierarchy is Mayflower (who some dismiss as splitters), pre-Winthrop fleet, Winthrop fleet, and pre-1642. I have no Mayflower (splitters), but I have all of the others.
lurker dean
what a racist asshole. and kirk has a face that begs to be punched.
i posted this kirk comment on fb. my gop/trump-loving brother responded “bigot,” without irony. it drives me crazy that he can’t see that this is representative of his entire party.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, I understand. I’m thinking, if you come from IL to go to school in WI and you want to drive in WI, you need to get a WI driver’s license after a certain number of months, and then when you go to do that, you register to vote at the DMV. But maybe that’s in the world where you also get a unicorn.
NoraLenderbee
Here is another link:
Mark Kirk being an ass
chopper
@Hob:
thx.
i got to make fun of ol’ grumpy omnes, so it’s a win. also, the computer i’m on is slow as hell, so a working link in the first place is always nice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: Legally, you need a DL from your home state. If you are going to school in WI but consider IL to be your home, you have no requirement to change DLs.
waysel
Here is a link to the video?
chopper
@waysel:
perfect. thx.
i’d respond to nora @139, but for some reason her ‘reply’ link only goes to the video. my wife’s computer is a real POS.
Hob
@chopper: Thanks for the reminder that looking stuff up with quickness isn’t always equally possible for everyone online. I forget that too often.
Peale
@Matt McIrvin: that said college students are probably easier to organize and reach than the 75% who don’t go to college. That’s another issue.
Matt McIrvin
@Lizzy L: You only need to get a new license when the old one expires, which could be years later. In the meantime you might have lost the habit of voting, because it’s not convenient for you.
Omnes Omnibus
@Peale: They are more likely to be in the same general place. They won’t have the weird problems that students might.
khead
@efgoldman:
Happy the Hokies won. I have a WV friend that makes fun of the empty Pitt stadiums every time they play because he is mad that Pitt is in the ACC and WVU is not.
Jags should really be better. They were supposed to be better anyway. Like the Raiders. Just glad I gave up on them weeks ago when it comes to betting. Bradley should be fired before we get up tomorrow.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: And they might well be too busy or stressed to even think of it as something worth bothering with.
dr. luba
You can watch the video, and Duckworth’s response, on the WP web site.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: Jobs for non-college grads tend to give you relatively little control over your time, though, which makes it that much harder to vote. The law generally says they have to give you some time off, but you know how that goes.
NoraLenderbee
@chopper: My fault. Let me try this:
Link
That seems to work.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: It depends on if the state you move to considers you a resident or not. In CA, if you are not a resident the fees you pay to the college, especially if you go to the state university or college system, are enormous. Residents get big breaks. Many college students do choose to become CA residents, and if they do that, they are required to get a CA DL. But every state is different and anyway, this is way far afield of the issue, which is, how do we get people to take voting seriously. Make Election Day a national holiday, check. What about each state issuing a voter ID card?
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L:
For whom? Fuck voter ID. When you register, you show that you are eligible to vote. Then you show up and vote.
Gwangung
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: If anybody had the right to call someone else a chicken hawk, it’s HER.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: A bunch of R-run states now require some kind of ID. I’d be quite happy to go back to the” register to vote, then vote” method, but there are bunches of places that isn’t sufficient. Of course, the thing to do is to toss out the Republicans, but that may take a while.
Okay, no voter ID. Universal vote by mail, like in Washington state? (I guess even in WA there are some polling places.) No intimidation at the polls, that way.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gwangung: Good point. Even though I think that he saw her as Asian only, because he is a racist prick.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lizzy L: Mail in ballots? Employers and spouses would never interfere. Would they?
Hob
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I’m puzzled that so many strong proponents of vote-by-mail don’t seem to think that’s an issue at all. Either it’s not acknowledged, or at best they’re like “Well theoretically I guess that could be a problem, but lack of access to the polls is a bigger problem, so whatever.” I get that it’s convenient but… to me the secret ballot is a big deal, and it’s enough to say that it can be a secret ballot for a lot of people if you can’t actually guarantee that it is that for everyone.
Hob
Er duh, “it’s enough to say” should have been “it’s not enough to say”.
Lizzy L
@Omnes Omnibus: Could happen, of course. OR, WA, & CO have all-mail elections. Someone’s got to have done some research on voter coercion, but I haven’t checked. Universal vote by mail seems very easy, convenient — except for people with no fixed address. OTOH, there’s a certain community spirit and excitement to going to a local polling place to vote which I rather like.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hob: I am going to go vote in person tomorrow.
Hob
@Lizzy L: The “no fixed address” issue already exists with in-person voting, it’s just at the registration stage. Different states have somewhat different rules for this but it generally boils down to “pick a location where you often are, and where you could collect mail if necessary.” And as far as I can tell, Colorado’s postal-only system works basically the same way. My problem with it is not that, but the lack of guarantee of privacy while voting— which of course is still a question with absentee ballots now, but right now in most states we’re not requiring everyone to vote absentee.
I’m not sure how “research on voter coercion” would even work. By nature I would think subjective reporting would be very problematic and I don’t know what other kind of data you could ever get. In political systems I think the predictive approach of “If such-and-such bad thing is easy to do, and is to someone’s advantage, it will get done – so let’s not make it easy to do” should be considered just as important as quantitative data.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Prezactly. All this red tape has been created specifically to impede voting by “those” people.
Hob
@Lizzy L: I have to call it a night but your comment did make me curious, and I did a little digging. Here is one example of a study in 2005 discussing potential pros and cons of vote-by-mail in Oregon. I notice that although they mentioned coercion near the beginning of the paper as one possible concern, they don’t say another word about it after that— the actual research part basically amounted to “We couldn’t find any recent instances of outright fraud [as in, party members just plain forging ballots].” Nor did they discuss how anyone might look for or prevent coercion.
This paper from the feds in 2006 does talk about coercion a bit more, but the recommendations are all variations on “Wait until someone files a complaint, or calls one in to a toll-free help line.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
first this
then this
and this
Lizzy L
@Hob: Interesting. Thanks for looking. I’m for bed. Night, all.
Mnemosyne
@JanieM:
Unfortunately, my mother died of cancer when I was young, and we kind of lost contact with her family. The cultural gap between my parents was a little smaller, I think, because the “old American” side was heavily Catholic (Irish and Italian on my dad’s side, so all natural-born Catholics there). I was told recently that there was a bit of a feeling that my mother was marrying down by marrying a (half-) Italian, and that my Irish-German paternal grandmother was told she was marrying down by marrying an Italian immigrant.
My older brother has the whole genealogy of our maternal line stuffed in a box somewhere, and I’m a little annoyed I gave it to him for “safekeeping” in the first place.
sunny raines
what is abundantly clear is that the republican “base” is made up of fundamentally bad people – people that have failed in measures of human decency and morality, many drastically so. Accordingly, it’s not that they have “lost” their minds, it’s that they don’t possess a functioning mind to begin with.
WaterGirl
@sunny raines:
fixed that for you.
goblue72
@Barbara: One drop rule never stopped with these mother-effers.
Ruckus
@Lizzy L:
I had to argue with the board of elections that my mailing address (my place of business) could be used to send me my mail ballot, as that was the address on my CDL. They said it wasn’t a residential area so they had no way to send it there. I asked so what does a homeless person do, they have no address what so ever, they can’t vote? Never heard another no from them, they just sent me my ballot (the business address was where I was living. My bad, I had no idea that everyone must live in an approved area)
Ruckus
@Hob:
Many states have vote by mail, and I’ve never heard that this is a problem. I’ve been voting by mail for a long time in CA and this does not seem to be an issue here although maybe it is and people can’t complain? I imagine it could be in some households but I’m thinking this would be, all things considered, a minor issue in a household like that. IOW a household with that type of controlling person “in charge” would be one that anyone of voting age should have left long ago.
Sm*t Cl*de
This Mark Kirk (from 2013):
What a class act he has turned out to be.
low-tech cyclist
Three of my four grandparents were immigrants. My grandparents on my father’s side, Russian Jews from Kiev and Warsaw (both part of Russia back then), were children when their parents brought them over here shortly before WWI. My maternal grandmother came over from Scotland as a young adult shortly after WWI.
But I have Revolutionary War ancestors through my fourth grandparent, my maternal grandfather, who was born in Kansas in 1898. Funny how that’s possible.
Tripod
Illinois Democrats are running against Governor Rauner, which suggests he has higher negatives than Trump. If so, that is damn impressive – and he was being touted as a VP pick two years ago.
Kirk and that appointed Comptroller are the other two GOP statewides left, and they are going down in flames this year.
chopper
@Ruckus:
another thing is, these days if some asshole wants to force his wife to vote a certain way he can do so in the voting booth as well. like ‘take a video of you voting and show me or so help me god…’
it’s easier to control a spouses vote in a vote by mail state tho.
mere mortal
That was really quite something, and the transcript does not do the event justice. There isn’t even a modicum of humor that I could detect in his voice.
I can’t say I’ve seen someone intentionally set themselves on fire since Romney, just after Obama invited him to “proceed, Governor”.
And Kirk’s use of gasoline made it a bit different.
Brachiator
I hadn’t watched the news or been near the Internets since sometime yesterday. I saw something about this story this morning, and it is even worse than I imagined.
A jaw droppingly racist failure of the imagination.
And Duckworth is just a badass boss.
Mel
@WaterGirl: I wholeheartedly agree. Mark Kirk is ridiculous.
I don’t live near, but from the coverage I’ve read over the past several years, it seems like he always ends up making personal attacks against her, and trying to blow up a smoke screen of fake drama to distract voters from the real issues at hand.
And Tammy Duckworth always has intelligence, grace, fierce strength and dignity in her responses to the nonsense that repubs throw at her.