I hear a lot of people saying “I wish the election was over, I can’t take it anymore”. I too wish that Hillary had already won the election officially, but when I probe, that’s not what these people usually mean. Instead they mean that they don’t like to be confronted with the reality that the GOP is a white nationalist party that nominated an ignorant, xenophobic sex abuser, and that the voters of the country are so out of it that at least 40% of them will vote for this lunatic.
Now, I understand wanting to hide from reality. I hide from it as much as possible myself! It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
But too much denial is a bad thing. People shouldn’t wish to go back to believing that the GOP is run by well-meaning daddies who just happen to have a different point of view than we do. Because it’s not. But after Hillary wins, most people will go back to believing it anyway. That’s the most dangerous thing of all.
piratedan
wow… a Monkees lyric… finally, after all of these years, acceptance at last! :-)
I still have hopes of doing it all, taking the POTUS, Senate and House… trying to have faith in the majority of Americans being able to see past the bullshit.
Major Major Major Major
I wish the election was over because it sucks.
WereBear
It will have to be hammered into their heads with relentless repetition. They don’t want to believe it.
Some never will.
khead
Having a REALLY hard time dealing with this. But I am compensating by offering 2-1 or 3-1 to anyone on my FB feed to anyone that wants to back Trump. I have a few suckers so far…..
Mary G
I’ve decided that I’ll never understand why so many American voters don’t think, just feel, and for no apparent reason feel what others tell them they should.
Smiling Mortician
I don’t just wish the election were over, I need it to be over. It’s wreaking havoc on my well-being.
Major Major Major Major
@khead: I won a fair bit betting on Hillary in the primary in February.
burnspbesq
Looks like Republican vote suppressors had a tough day in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
Baud
@Smiling Mortician: all the the misinformation is a form of terrorism.
khead
@Major Major Major Major:
I am…. out there financially with respect to taunting people who expect to actually get paid.
Still not worried.
gorram
I glad some of y’all can talk it over with them, because I remember a lot of this set calling me The Real Fascist for say the orange demon would win their primary because he offered exactly the terribleness they crave. Yes, I’m bitter.
geg6
I hear you, Doug.
I feel a lot like I felt in the run up to the Iraq War. Proud to be on the right side, despair about how very many assholes this country has among its citizenry. Almost half of us are just murderous monsters. I lost friends then and I’ve lost more now.
I know it will still suck after the election, but I still want the election to be over. I want that part of this free floating anxiety I feel to be resolved.
Soylent Green
Even worse. Forty five percent, not forty.
BBA
Well, I think we should attack Trump voters…
oldgold
Has NBC publicly protested Trump’s treatment of Katy Tur today?
Chip Daniels
Its again the privilege of whiteness that awful behavior is excused and tolerated.
Yes, there are a tremendous number of white people in this country who have awful, vile attitudes towards their fellow Americans, and no, they cannot hide behind economic insecurity or declining church attendance or whatever other excuse the media wants to make.
Frank Wilhoit
It is not “the election” that needs to end — after all, the next one will begin on the following day, which is no improvement.
What needs to end is the death struggle of a republic that throve within the memory of many persons still living, but that has not thriven within the memory of perhaps a greater number.
Old Broad in California
I have no illusions about what the Republican party is, but knowing that this completely unqualified, racist, misogynist, rancid piece of trash is this close to being President is deeply disturbing. It’s seriously depressing me and affecting my sleep. I’ve already voted for Hillary and plan to do more GOTV phone banking this weekend. But I need it to be over.
JJ
Yeah … hope and denial are both slippery slopes for me. I lost my shit over those hanging chads. Honestly, I’m so grateful to have found this place. Before I did I was the biggest junkie I knew.
ThresherK
@burnspbesq: The voter suppression effort reminds me of a Pat Riley defense: Hack on every play and depend on the officials to get tired of calling all the fouls.
mike in dc
“Most white people are kinda racist” is not something you will hear coming out of the mouth of news anchors, pundits or other talking heads on teevee. There’s a kind of tacit agreement to dance around the topic. Individual instances of dog whistling can be called out, but pointing out the reality of how many states manifest racially polarized voting is verboten, nor is it permitted to suggest racial animus as a major factor in said polarization.
Major Major Major Major
@mike in dc: America will be ungovernable as long as blaming democrats is easier than acknowledging reality.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: This. Thank you.
Spider-Dan
TBH, I’m having a difficult time dealing with the anxiety from this election.
The only way I’ve been able to cope so far is by telling myself that most of the issues I care deeply about do not affect me directly:
I won’t be alive to deal with climate change in 100 years.
I don’t have a uterus.
I’m not Latino.
I’m not a Muslim.
I’m not on Obamacare.
(I am a black male, but at least for BLM issues, Trump would simply preserve the status quo, not enact a massive rollback. I guess?)
It’s become incredibly difficult to care about these issues while hearing erstwhile allies continue to complain about The E-mails.
Ultimately, if this country picks Trump, we deserve what we get.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Too many people desperately want to believe that Trump is some kind of unscrupulous con man who stole in in the night and hoodwinked all their stout yeoman voters. And, to be sure, Trump is an unscrupulous con man. But the people who voted for him didn’t do it because he put one over on them. They knew what they were doing, and they knew why they were doing it. They knew who and what he was when they went to the primaries.
But the serious people desperately don’t want to believe that. I don’t know why they’re so set on believing that. I don’t know why the Very Serious People are so invested in this shit show. I really don’t. And what’s worse, I don’t know what is ever going to convince these people that the Republicans are worth a shit.
The only way we’re going to make it is if the Republicans either die off or clean themselves up, and that won’t happen as long as so many people give them cover on this and keep believing that they’re still anything other than a retrograde, quasi-fascist, white nationalist party.
Baud
@Spider-Dan: I hear you. I’ll relatively confident I’ll be ok, but it’s tough to be emotionally detached from the consequences.
JMG
I gave more money and phone banked today. Made me feel better for awhile. Meanwhile, there is no poll Nate Silver gets that doesn’t translate to Clinton being closer to losing. She lost 1.4 percent of her win chance on the last poll of the night, one showing her down in Missouri by nine.There is, according to Silver, an 11 percent chance Clinton wins the popular vote and loses to Trump in the electoral college. Man, his model is ALL black swan tail risk. I don’t think Clinton is 99 percent sure of winning like Sam Wang does, but some of the things I’ve seen on 538 don’t seem to make sense. Maybe we need a model aggregating model of models..
Honus
@ThresherK: give credit where credit is due. That’s kryzewski’s defense.
Baud
@JMG: One model to rule them all.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Of our two major parties, one is actively trying to destroy the country. Also, if you’re not a rich middle-aged white guy, that party hates you. And with or without the White House, it has plenty of power.
It’s depressing and infuriating, and being depressed and infuriated is exhausting.
And these fuckers won’t stop on November 9th.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Just remember, “and then they came for me”.
BGinCHI
When the election is over, Obama can fire Comey and a bunch of women can launch their civil suits against Trump while the Russian economy sinks further into the toilet.
gorram
@Spider-Dan: Stop and frisk though…?
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Of course.
@BGinCHI: Looking forward to a week from today.
Monala
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Some of it may be because it’s hard to reconcile the people you know with Trump voters. Like, I know I know some wingnuts on my FB feed, so their Trump support hardly surprises me. But when the sweet little old lady who used to babysit my daughter came out as a proud Trump supporter, saying the vilest things about Hilary and those who would vote for her – I’m just stunned.
Barry
@Spider-Dan: “I am a black male, but at least for BLM issues, Trump would simply preserve the status quo, not enact a massive rollback. I guess?”
Why? The only question in his supporters’ mind is ‘1935 or 1835?’.
debbie
@burnspbesq:
That process is a powerful argument against state’s rights.
hovercraft
Reposting.
Your next Secretary of Defense America
Spider-Dan
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Oh, I haven’t forgotten that. But at the end of the day, if none (or more accurately, enough) of these groups don’t care enough to stop Trump from being elected, and are busy voting for Jill Stein or not voting at all (but I repeat myself)… what am I supposed to do about it?
At this point, it feels like if Trump wins, the left is fully committed to deposing itself from power every 8 years (at most). Why even bother caring in that scenario?
Baud
@Monala: I’ve been saying for a long time now that this will be a clarifying election.
Unfortunately, clarity can be difficult.
dm
I think part of wanting it to be over comes from the fact that minds were made up in May for 90% of the electorate, and that it’s just been haggling over the last ten percent ever since.
ThresherK
@Honus: Point made..
kd bart
@JMG: Saw that. Missouri, a state which has never been in play and has always been in the Trump +10 range, should not have that much effect on the probability. Especially when it’s compared to 4 polls earlier in the day from Colorado, New Mexico & Nevada that showed Clinton at + 7/8 & Arizona at Trump +1 reduced Clinton’s probability by .4%
Baud
One good thing revealed in this election. I’m really proud of our team. So many awesome people from top to bottom.
debbie
@oldgold:
I had to Google to find out what you meant. Shame on NBC if they don’t.
(((CassandraLeo)))
Can’t speak for everyone who wants this election to be over, but I know some of them are literally being triggered as PTSD survivors by things that have happened. Given that Trump is an obvious sexual predator and that he and his surrogates have used many tactics of abusers, this is not really surprising. This behaviour probably won’t entirely disappear after the election, but at least Trump himself may be given less prominence in the media. I’m not a survivor of sexual assault myself, but being LGBTQ I am a member of a group which is disproportionately victimsed by it, and I have been extremely close to other people who were. I also have PTSD for other reasons. This election is dredging up unpleasant memories of what some of the survivors I was close to have gone through, as well as other unpleasant memories from high school. Clinton winning the election won’t make the GOP magically stop sucking (especially since Trumpism is an outgrowth of GOP policies over the last 36+ years), but it will discredit Trump and his surrogates, and maybe we won’t have to listen to them so much.
cthulhu
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
The “serious” media people live off the horse race. So they are invested.
As to the “serious” people in the GOP, I think many of them largely knew what their base was about since the re-alignment due to the civil rights era. Sure, it doesn’t look great for all this stuff to be said out loud and likely has continuing long term consequences for the party but what are these guys really supposed to do when this is the voting block still most likely to get them what they want. The mutual disdain between the base and the elites as been there for some time but no divorce is on the immediate horizon for this marriage made in hell.
Spider-Dan
@gorram: A rollback to 2010 stop-and-frisk is not like the kind of rollbacks other groups are facing. Especially given the following:
@Barry: The status quo is that unarmed black men are killed, without consequence, at the whim of either law enforcement or private citizens (Zimmerman). Not much room to threaten a rollback there.
Hungry Joe
The last time I felt this kind of seemingly endless dread was when finals week was approaching. I knew I’d come out all right in the end, but I also knew there was a lot of suffering to endure between now and then. I’d just say to myself “(Such-and-such a date) WILL come, and it’ll all be okay.” And it always did, and it always was. But as usual, in order to assure a happy ending there’s a lot of studying … I mean, phone banking and precinct walking to do.
Issa’s going DOWN, and I’m going to be the one … well, one of many who make it happen.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: Most of American history is a powerful argument against states’ rights.
andy
@geg6: Console yourself with the fact that such people are incapable of genuine friendship anyway.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: Its whole word reading and new math. Drives them right to the streets…
Diana
@gorram: I’m bitter too.
Everyone with a brain could tell that the Iraq war was going to be a disaster … that was why there were such huge protests (I went to every protest I could). So I was pleasantly surprised when the Rethugicans voted against Jeb. Apparently they could change their mind, after all….
but I was wrong. They just needed a change of personnel.
The thing is, a Trump presidency (god forbid) or a refusal to ever allow another liberal on the Supreme Court (much more likely) will impact more than just people who join the military or cost us more in taxes. The nation could be in for some bad times ahead. Because whatever these idiots believe, the carbon in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, and the longer we take to do anything about it, the worse climate change is going to get.
hovercraft
Tweety thinks that Hillary has not articulated what she wants to do as president, her entire campaign has been a negative one, all she does is attack Trump. Maybe the fact that all of the momentum is on Trumps side will force her to go positive. People like a positive campaign. Apparently she has ignored Michelle’s dictum to go high when he goes low, she’s in the gutter with him. He began the show by showing clips of Trump calling her crooked, demented/unstable, and being weak , he contrasted that with her asking the crowd to imagine him in the oval office in January. That was his demonstration of how ugly and nasty the campaign has become. FFS
Baud
@Hungry Joe: California is awesome. I may need to move there.
JJ
@Monala: I wonder sometimes how many relationships have been permanently compromised due to Tr*mp’s rise. As for fb, I don’t have any T supporters. I got rid of a bunch of virulent bros too. I don’t like expending my internal resources on that low-information crowd without my choosing.
Lizzy L
The folks here and at LGM are helping me stay sane. Thank you.
Baud
@Lizzy L: Best two blogs.
Adam L Silverman
@oldgold: Now that’s funny!
Iowa Old Lady
@Hungry Joe: If you (and your neighbors) take Issa down, you will have my undying gratitude.
I scanned our local paper tonight to see if there was any more info on the police officers shot in Urbandale, and preliminary word is they were both white. There’s some of that white-on-white violence for you.
Hungry Joe
@Baud: Whoa there, pardner. You reckon the state’s big enough for both of us?
Latino J
Growing up latino in Florida during the peak of the 1980’s “English as the first language” movement and having lived in rural southeast Georgia for the past decade, I’m amazed that people have ever known any other reality.
I remember being told by teachers that the Spanish pronounciation and spelling of my name was now wrong because I lived in the USA. And being told by a classmate senior year “of course you got into that college, you’re Spanish.” And I definitely remember all the times people with half my mother’s English vocabulary talked down to her because of her accent.
In a sense, I’m glad we had this wake up call. As much of a melting pot as we can be, the USA has always had an unofficial caste system that is tied to who Are “real Americans” based on racial, cultural, and religious lines. That hasn’t changed and this election has definitely brought these attitudes to the forefront.
Baud
@Hungry Joe: You running out of water or something?
MomSense
I think many of us are confronted by the xenophobia, gun worship, racism, sexism, and all the rest of the ugliness every day. We want this election to be over not because we are in denial but because we are all absolutely aware of how much damage Trump could do with the power that comes with the office of POTUS.
I also can’t imagine there are any non troll commenters here who are under any illusion the Republicans are run by well-meaning daddies.
We are worried because we know full well what a nightmare a Trump presidency would be and we care about what happens to people. The fear is real because the stakes are high. Even though we feel sick about this election, many of us are donating to Dems and volunteering. We’re also venting and trying to support each other here.
Lurking Canadian
@kd bart: I think the praise Silver got after 2012 went to his head and now he thinks he really is a wizard who can see things others cannot.
To address DougJ’s original point, I want it to be over so Clinton can win before the media and the FBI manage to blow enough smoke for Trhmp to win.
The Pale Scot
So where I was today (we help people get birth certificates etc) a woman rushed up and a said that she need a BC because Jesus told her she needed to leave the country before the end of the year so she needed to get a BC so she could get a passport. Portent???
Bad sentence structure, Yeah I know.
dmsilev
The Definitive “Trump voters are angry” story:
etc.
danielx
I do wish it was over with an HRC victory, because (as with others) the knowledge that a great many of our fellow citizens are going to vote for Cheetoh Hitler. There are Trump signs in front of two of my neighbors’ houses, and it’s sort of like finding out your neighbor is a child molester. They are nice people, perfectly willing to give a hand and so forth and so on, but the knowledge that they support this, this….ignorant (and proud of it), prejudiced, hateful sonofabitch isn’t going to go away and it’s depressing. Granted that I live in the most Republican county in the state, but it is still a shock. I get that there are people out there who detest Hillary, and I get that there are those who just want to burn the motherfucker down, but most Trump voters seem to be not misguided but vile. It’s not news, exactly, but it’s depressing that there are so many of them – people who clearly do not believe in the democratic process and want to see it go away.
Mary G
@Hungry Joe: Yes! Have you seen the new signs?
Issa: 16 Years Neglecting His District
Issa: 16 Years Enriching Himself
Darrell Issa & Donald Trump
Two Bullies Too Many
Vote Colonel Doug Applegate
This also too:
I’m not sure the Republicans realize that is not helping at all. Trump is greatly disliked here for acting like an ass when he tried to buy the Ambassador Hotel in LA. I barely remembered it, but several older Republicans have brought it up. Tying him around Issa’s neck like an anchor seems to be working well.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Okay, that’s it, i just subscribed to their RSS feed. ‘Cause I apparently don’t do enough reading on the internet.
Cheryl from Maryland
I do not want this election to end while there is still a chance of Rubio loosing, of Kander winning. I can endure inconveniences and stress for the main goal — a resounding Clinton victory, a Democratic Senate, future liberal Supreme Court justices, a Republican Speaker and House diminished.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Frank Wilhoit:
I want to thank you for writing “throve” and “thriven”; I want to tear my hair out that the computer I’m writing this on thinks that throve and thriven aren’t words.
Baud
@WaterGirl: I don’t comment there, but many Juicers do.
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: Unlikely. For a variety of reasons. And he’d be tremendously ineffective. He has a reputation among his peers. In fact he wasn’t even the best general officer Intel person in the Army when he was made the Director of the DIA. That honor goes to LTG LeGere, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for Intelligence/G2 of the Army. She’s one high speed, low drag intel bubbette! Unfortunately it went to Flynn. I was never quite sure why.
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: Tweety was slurring his speech again. They need to install a breathalyzer on his teleprompter. If he doesn’t blow sober, the teleprompter won’t unlock and run his copy.
Baud
@Adam L Silverman: Those are relevant considerations in a Trump administration?
JMG
They know they can’t take on the vast majority of the world that’s not white and is young, so they believe if they can subjugate their enemies here, the rest of the world will just go away. One of my best friends in college got a patent (chemistry whiz) that made him rich. He bought a cabin in Maine where all he has done for 25 years is listen to wingnut talk radio. Still a charming guy on his infrequent visits to the real world, but he lives in a scary hateful fantasy world of his own creation.
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: Chris Matthews is beyond horrible. He latches onto one thing and hammers it with his face-hole for weeks. And I think that like the other Chris, Berman, he’ll be doing his incredibly obnoxious shtick for years upon years upon years.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl from Maryland: I only want it to end if Hillary is elected and we win the Senate and the House.
Mary G
@Adam L Silverman: SATSQ
No pen1s. Same as with Hillary.
Adam L Silverman
@Lizzy L: @Baud: And if we ever get our hands on those two blogs they’re in a lot of trouble. They’re making us look bad!
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: heh, not bad.
FlipYrWhig
@FlipYrWhig: And it’s always VOTERS WANT EXACTLY THE THINGS I WANT AND IM GRUMPY SO THEY ARE TOO AND WHAT:LL THE CANDIDATES DO ABOUT IT
WaterGirl
@Baud: When I searched for “lawyer guns money”, the search results made it seem like there are maybe two or three front pagers there. Is everybody good, or would you recommend anyone in particular over anyone else?
Adam L Silverman
@Latino J: Provided that it is, just, a wake up call. Rather than the bell tolling. I think its the former, but anything is possible.
mike in dc
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, this “working class vs the elites” stuff is ludicrously trite. How about “America has an ignorant racist yahoo problem”?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Yes. So if you show up here, please bring water for yourself and the rest of the class.
FlipYrWhig
@WaterGirl: Lemieux is the best by far on substance. SEK is the best entertainment value. Loomis and Campos have their hobbyhorses and go riding off into strange territory sometimes. I mix up Shakezula and bspencer, because I think they have similar styles. I have no impression of djw. There may be others too.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: You miss my point. Even if he gets the position the GOs/FOs will ignore him. And because he’s a peer, they’ll get away with it.
hovercraft
Tweety thinks Trump had something with his message, the people were tired of the elite, the ruling class, and when he gets his 40 something percent the elite should take notice of those people, not the ones who prevailed because those people are going to become even angrier.
Again with the coddling of those fucking people, in an election one side wins and the other loses. If the losing sides guiding principle is that it’s their way or the highway, then fuck them with a a jagged edged rusty chain saw, dipped in acid.
FlipYrWhig
@mike in dc: Especially because OH NOES THE WHITE WORKING CLASS ISNT VOTING DEMOCRAT has been a phenomenon for at least 36 years and explained perfectly well for at least 50. Spoiler alert: it’s because of black people.
Baud
@WaterGirl: what @FlipYrWhig said.
It’s a bit more academic/intellectual than BJ, and more labor issues and history than here.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: I’m not sure that was the case here. Especially given the grief the Army had gotten from its 2013 promotion board results regarding women, minorities, and anyone not from the Infantry Branch.
satby
@piratedan: RIP Davy Jones.
As to the election, it’s not only the incredible ugliness on display, it’s also the relentless tension of fear: fear of what’s been unleashed and how things will be no matter if Clinton and the “good guys” win. Because this election is tearing people apart, and just like before the Civil War, it’s impossible to empathize with the other side because of the evil they support.
hovercraft
@Adam L Silverman:
I was being facetious, but nice to know he as unqualified for the job as he comes across on TV.
Major Major Major Major
Oh my god you people and fucking Chris Matthews smh
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft:
STILL. Still! He says the same fucking thing every motherfucking day! He makes millions of dollars every year for flapping his stupid mouth and SOMEONE ELSE is the tiresome ruling elite. Jesus Christ someone take him out behind the barn and end it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G:
And the “great businessman” got his ass handed to him by a bunch of LAUSD bureaucrats.
WaterGirl
@FlipYrWhig: Looks like Campos and Loomis are the only ones who have a direct feed to their stuff. At least that’s all that shows up when I search. (besides the main page)
MomSense
@Baud:
Same with me. I’m also a big fan of the awl.
how not to drink on election night
Baud
@MomSense: Not familiar with them.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@FlipYrWhig: I’m so glad I gave up watching Tweety for the new year.
danielx
True story – I and a guy I work with were at a customer’s home last week, and on Wednesday the customer (who had seemed like a very nice woman), comes bolting out of the house. First she asks if I’m a Hillary supporter; I responded that I was something less than ecstatic about her but didn’t care for Trump – she’s a customer, right? I have not survived to my present age by getting in political arguments with people who are paying me, they are welcome to whatever opinions they like as long as the check clears. Anyhoo, she starts raving about Comey’s announcement, this is a (ahem) game changer and so forth and so on, Faux News blaring in the background – she is telling me all this while I’m on top of a fucking ladder. She just had to tell somebody, and I was handy. I did express some concern about Donald Trump having the nuclear codes and blowing the world off its axis because he gets pissed off at somebody he feels has dissed him, and she was all “oh, he won’t do that.”
I didn’t bother to ask why she thought Donald Trump, having (god forbid) reached the Oval Office, would stop…being Donald Trump.
Adam L Silverman
@WaterGirl: That Loomis guy is a known agitator… More seriously, they’re all good. Shakezula used to comment here – at least she did when I came aboard (I’m sorry I drove you away, its okay to come back!!!!). I know Farley by correspondence – may have met him at a professional meeting once. Lemieux’s legal analytical stuff is excellent, as is Campos’s. Some of the older members of the site don’t post as much these days and a lot of time Farley just links to his paid stuff at other places. Overall its well worth your time. I check in there once or twice a day.
Ruckus
@Spider-Dan:
No we do not deserve tRump, even if whatever fucking deity you like forbids, he wins. I don’t,
mostnone of the people I know deserve him and you as a black man especially don’t deserve him. He is a fucking racist shithead. Among other not good things. He will never be better than that and if he gets elected that will empower all the rest of the fucking racist shitheads to roll back this country 200-300 yrs. I’m an old white guy and I don’t want that, I can not imagine any black person would want that either.mike in dc
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m lazy. When I get home I turn on MSNBC and he’s on before Chris Hayes and Maddow. Halperin and Heileman are even more worthless at 6. Chuck Todd is barely tolerable at 5. Lawrence O’Donnell is adequate but often kinda meh. At this point I’d say fire Phil Griffin and bring on new talking heads.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: I was skimming the article at your link and got flashbacks to the night Reagan was elected the second time. I was out drinking and was absolutely positively certain that our country was not stupid enough to elect him a second time. I came home, slightly inebriated, heard the news and sank to the floor, crying in despair. Do. Not. Want. To. Think. About. That. Night.
hovercraft
@FlipYrWhig:
Notice how it always the white men bitching about democrats losing the WWC, I think we have a problem where these men want us to go back to when they were the dominant figures within the party. Nancy, Obama, and now Hillary on top of the fact that there is so much emphasis on POC and women, is on the one hand celebrated for the milestones they represent, but at the same time there is the feeling of a loss of power. Diversifying makes this inevitable, these assholes can’t have it both ways. Much as we’d like to have everyone, they have to be willing to embrace the reality of a multicultural party, not just the concept.
Archon
Nothing really has surprised me this election but I do have to admit that the very real possibility that after everything we know and have heard about Trump, this election might end with the press focusing their time and energy on what’s most likely Hillary’s duplicate emails is absolutely shocking.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@FlipYrWhig: There’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s a big part of it.
MomSense
@Baud:
I think you will like their weather report.
cmorenc
@danielx:
Exactly. I could live with neighbors who supported McCain and Romney, because as strongly as I thought these men represented terrible policy choices, neither were such transparently evil, nasty people the way Trump is. I will have a hard time looking the ones with Trump signs in their yard put up *after* all the things Trump has been captured on video saying and doing – racist, xenophobic, sexually abusive, nasty, narcissistic and so on… WHAT THE HELL KIND OF PEOPLE ARE YOU ANYWAY I will have to suppress shouting at them as I walk by and they are out in their yards.
Baud
@WaterGirl: Second time? Wasn’t it clear for a long time before election night that he was going to win?
2004 I can understand.
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: He’s not unqualified in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities. He’s unqualified on temperament. He was, from all the reports I’ve seen, very, very bad as DIA Director. Not in the “didn’t know what he was doing” way. He knows how to administrate and he knows intel. Rather, he was a toxic leader and disrespectful to the civilian leadership that he reported to as well. And in a time of budget scarcity and uncertainty where you can’t augment personnel through any of the normal or extraordinary means, all a toxic leader does is drive people away that can’t be replaced. From what I know of him it was a sad ending to an otherwise distinguished career. Which, perhaps, explains his becoming very bitter, disenchanted, and angry. If you want a really good idea about him, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EghwCDNyiY
srv
The best thing about this election is that however it turns out, it will never end.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Are you ready? Are you going to curse me out now? I’m ready, I’m here for you. Take your best shot.
FlipYrWhig
@mike in dc: Their ad campaigns are really bad, too. Like when they have the glamour shot of all their hard-working campaign trail reporters. Ew. Or the soothing expertise in tough times of Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, and Brian Williams, none of whom know diddly about squat. And stop trying to make Jacob Soboroff happen. It’s not going to happen.
JMG
Every day I get up and do stuff for the Clinton campaign and I feel OK. Then when night comes and there’s nothing to do, as phone banking during Game Seven of the World Series seems like a bad idea, my anxiety, oh, hell, call it what it is, fear, takes over. Makes sleep difficult.
WaterGirl
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you! And thanks to Baud and FlipYrWig, also.
MomSense
@Adam L Silverman:
Do you read armscontrolwonk.com ?
Ruckus
@Monala:
I’m not stunned. I’ve been hearing racist crap come out of mouths attached to white people of all descriptions/genders for over 6 decades. Over the last few years I’ve managed to have less and less contact with the racist white assholes, but you can not get rid of all of them, they are like cockroaches, they will outlast tRump’s nuclear war. It’s one way I know there is no god, the only things to outlast all out nuclear war will be cockroaches and racists.
Brachiator
This election is getting crazier by the minute. How soon after California Proposition 64 passes will someone be able to buy legal weed?
I am asking for a friend.
danielx
@Brachiator:
Of course you are.
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: Yes, I think that’s entirely it for the Baby Boomer people like the lamentable Matthews and the late and unlamented Russert: they want the burly hairy Democratic Party back before it got all brown and girlie and fey. Because they think OF THEMSELVES as hardworking working class joes and they want a party to reflect their fantasy selves back to themselves. Maureen Dowd has a similar neurosis.
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
2000 was that night for me. Do. Not. Want. I knew 1980 would be terrible becaise I was a teenager and didn’t need proof that adults were stupid.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I had faith that people couldn’t possibly be that stupid. No internet to speak of back then. Plus I was probably young and stupid.
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: Sometimes. If I have a reason to. Why?
satby
@hovercraft: And all the white working class union guys I know (Ironworkers, mostly) are all in in the Democrats, so whatever Tweety is yapping about, he’s wrong.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator:
Of course.
Major Major Major Major
@hovercraft: go f–
@srv: oh, hi, didn’t see you there. You’re garbage. You would probably poison somebody slowly with a heavy metal just to see how long it took them to notice and then frame their spouse. I don’t know where you went to college but you were probably assistant editor of the conservative rag and thought you were funny, but obviously not even good enough at that shitty extracurricular to make the #1 spot. Go fuck yourself.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I was late to the thread last night. Im sorry you lost someone who had meant so much to you. I did that once, decades ago, when I realized that being around her made me feel bad. It sucks, cuz you want what you had, even if it’s gone.
Zinsky
Cheer up, Sleepy Jean… Doug! Great post. I think your point is right on. Let me frame it a slightly different way – Trump has normalized racist, misogynistic, bigot speech and the use of violence in lieu of civil debate. That is a huge problem! It may take decades to undo this shitbag’s damage to our democratic republic.
Ruckus
@Diana:
If tRump wins, climate change is the least of our worries because he’s very liable to do
somethingeverything possible that’s stupid and dangerous. If he owes money to Russian banks/government do you think he’s doing this for better terms? Or to have our military at his control? I’m going with C, both of the above. How do you think that will work out?WaterGirl
@Ruckus:
I know, I know! :: raises hand ::
pluky
@JMG: ignore nate silver. he has sold out to the dark gods of click bait. this cycle sam wang is the goto guru.
JMG
It’s better to be leading a close election than not leading, but it’s still horrible to think it’s a nontrivial chance Trump’s President.
MomSense
@Adam L Silverman:
Just wondering what you thought.
Major Major Major Major
@JMG: what @pluky said. He’s got a nonzero chance but not by much.
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: Their stuff is good, even when I don’t agree with it.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: thanks.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
LGM is quite like BJ but with different basic subjects. Here it’s cats and dogs, there it’s law schools, etc. Not a bad place, other than threaded comments, which render it just about useless to me.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@ThresherK:
Don’t forget Bob Knight pretty much invented that.
p.a.
@Ruckus: I’m not quite to my 6th decade, but beside that this is exactly my experience. The only surprise to me is it took a Republican this long to cut through the dog whistle ‘subtlety’ to really unleash the filth. An untapped resource for any pol willing to go there.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Baud: More intellectual than BJ? Say it ain’t so!
Diana
@Ruckus: yeah, but if tRump wins, our military must’ve voted for them.
So too bad for them.
Matt McIrvin
@JMG: Clinton has zero chance of winning Missouri–why would a bad poll there affect her win chance at all? Only if Silver’s model is smeared out ridiculously in both directions.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: BooMan has threaded comments, which I am not crazy about. Still, I miss when BooMan’s place wasn’t so I don’t even know how to describe it. Maybe after the election it will get better again.
Baud
@WaterGirl: Used to be one of my favorites too. That place lost it in the primary.
Ruckus
@p.a.:
Well for the last 30 yrs they had an agreement among themselves that they would dog whistle all the racist stuff and wink, wink, nudge, nudge each other so that they could make it look like they were on the up and up. tRump at least has done one thing positive for the country, and that is expose pretty much the entire republican party for what they are, fucking racists.
FlipYrWhig
@WaterGirl: Booman has the craziest comment section.
WaterGirl
@FlipYrWhig: It wasn’t always like that.
Ruckus
@Diana:
tRump being in control of the military is not a good thing for the racists in the military, not when they find out that he’ll want to use them for his personal goon squad in far away places. And for target practice
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: During primary season LGM was mostly pro-Bernie and also rational (nothing but contemptuous of Busters like HA Goodman); as a Hillary supporter I liked to go over there and see a good take from the other side.
The LGM comment threads seem if anything slightly more combative than here, with some peculiar regulars. The headliners are mostly good though.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: what’s the troll situation over there?
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I left Booman long time ago. So long ago that I can not even remember why.
waysel
@Spider-Dan: You do know what they mean by ” increased stop and frisk”, right? Trans: More, better executions of blacks that dare to show themselves in public. Ameture shootist welcome. The most efficient stop and frisk involves neither. More like ‘see and shoot’. Thats how I heard Trumps statement. I am a 60 year old white male.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Agree. There were a couple of times I thought they went a little crazy, but nothing too bad.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: They have a couple at least. Different than ours though.
Ruckus
And just for an update, and with the understanding that every thread on BJ is an open thread, today was my last day seeing if they could make my insides glow in the dark. Now we wait to see if we were successful.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Kind of surprising that you can’t remember why. But I guess you’ve slept since then. :-) TarheelDem is what keeps me coming back to BooMan’s place.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman:
I don’t see how “unlikely” follows from all that. It seems like you’re assuming that a Trump Administration would be an attempt at an actual government instead of some kind of horrific bust-out carried out by a mob of freaks, grifters and fanatics.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: So glad for you that you made it through that hurdle! I’m just so sorry to know that you might have to wait a year before you can know if the treatment was successful. Do you have to move to a next round of something else, or is all that behind you and now it’s the waiting game?
You don’t see me, but I am always there in your corner, pulling for you.
Chris T.
@WaterGirl: Threaded comments aren’t necessarily bad. The problem is that we have an interface that works terribly with threaded comments (namely, a browser). Back in the days of USElessNET we had “trn”, the threaded news reader, which let you read threads while only reading new replies in the threads.
MomSense
@Ruckus:
Hoping for success.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: They had a really nasty Nazi type infesting them for a little while and harassing all the commenters with Jewish-sounding names, but they managed to ban him hard enough to keep him away eventually.
Major Major Major Major
@Chris T.: threaded comments on a blog are evil. Absolutely unusable.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Trump himself is not going to be in charge of transition. Right now its Christie, my guess it will slip to someone else. Putting Flynn in as SecDef is, I think, unlikely. More likely would be National Security Advisor. That would make him the security gatekeeper to Trump. My guess is that would be his preferred position.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris T.: It wouldn’t be impossible to implement something like trn in a modern browser. Naive users would probably find it a bit abstruse, though. But I loved the way it showed the threading as a tree display that you could walk around really rapidly with the keyboard.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Ruckus: Thoughts of success from here.
WaterGirl
Not quite sure what to think of Lawyers, Guns and Money so far. Haven’t read the threads, but I’m looking at titles:
The Cubs Must Not Win (VII) – hiss…
Reroute the pipeline – yay!
Kill the Feral Cats – seems harsh
The Clinton Rules and the Media’s Ghastly Failure to Inform the Public – can’t disagree with that title!
sigaba
For me at least, the election is over. I’ve learned three things:
1) A Donald Trump could make a reasonable showing for the Presidency.
2) Otherwise reliable leftists will accept Russian propaganda as long as it confirms various hoary and ancient anti-establishment tropes and cliches.
3) The FBI is willing to play the role of Praetorian Guard.
It makes a difference who wins, very much, but knowing that Hillary is basically holding the office, at most, so that nothing happens on the Republican agenda is deeply demoralizing. I’d like to live in a world where she can get her SCOTUS appointments by some incredible subterfuge and (perish the thought) occasionally get a law passed, while not having her every bowel movement under Congressional subpoena, but I know that’s… unlikely.
I have never been more certain than now that the US shouldn’t have a President, or that the non-ceremonial duties should be devolved to a legislative organ.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Just waiting for now. If it works I good to go. If it didn’t then I have no idea what happens next. Live with it as long as possible? I’ve been told surgery is out after radiation, so that’s not an option, possibly another round or/and chemo. However my doc thinks it is a very high probability that we will be successful, considering it was caught relatively early, just before it became truly aggressive, so I’ve got that going for me. I’d say good luck to me but you have to understand that Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day, and a wish for good luck usually doesn’t end all that well. Plus the last 20+ yrs of being shit upon regularly have sort of turned around for me in the last 2-3 yrs and I’m hoping that this wasn’t that 20+ yr tradition continuing.
Major Major Major Major
@sigaba:
Right??
Prime Minister Ryan would like your opinion on his nomination to fill Scalia’s seat–Ted Cruz or Chris Christie?
p.a.
When Hillary wins, I hope there’s some kind of full court p.r. press against Rethugs’ ‘legislative nullification’. This assumes the recent poll tightening precludes both houses being flipped to D majorities. (Working majorities, not Evan Bayh-type ‘let’s not offend our friends across the aisle” majorities.)
Spider-Dan
@Ruckus: I certainly don’t want Trump and I’m doing all I can to stop it.
But I can’t help but think that any system capable of producing President Trump – in 2016! – has no right to continue existing. The ultimate, fatal flaw in our system of government will have been exposed.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
I went into a 2 month depression after Reagan was elected the first time.
I suddenly realized I did not recognize the country I lived in.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus:
I’m gonna go with that happy thought, then. Good things are ahead.
Part of LMM’s sonnet from the Tony awards has haunted me (in a good way) and it seems relevant to this conversation.
sigaba
@Major Major Major Major: I think the Republicans would lose their luster in the House if people knew they were voting for Ryan to have the Button. Or rather, I don’t think they would vote for a House Republican if the Republicans were unable to actually decide who would be Prime Minister, which is the likely scenario at present. If you make House elections a proxy for the executive it completely changes the underlying dynamic of House races.
Also the fact that the Speaker would have so much power might make people actually pay attention to things like apportionment; it might also make our press actually cover legislative agendas and not make everything into a horserace/character contest between two people, that nobody can win.
Or, just to be dark about it: if the voters want Prime Minister Ryan, let them fucking have him, so at least people like me know what kind of country we live in. Thus Abraham Lincoln:
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus:
Yep.
Major Major Major Major
@p.a.:
Ooh, might have some bad news for ya.
Ruckus
@sigaba:
It’s a good system, as long as the citizens actually want a government. The 40-45% of tRump supporters/republicans have been convinced that government is the entire problem with why they can’t get their racism on full throttle. And for them that means we need to stifle/destroy government, a task which their elected leaders have been not all that unsuccessful. It also takes citizen involvement but we have a situation that most of us have to work a lot of hours to make enough to have a life, and I’m not going into that nest now. Next we have grown over the last couple of centuries just a tad, but our congress has not so the rural areas with less of the population have an out sized amount of influence.
I think we need to adjust some things but that won’t happen as long as conservatives are as bat shit crazy/racist as they currently are. Which is why unless we get Clinton, the senate and the house, it’s a stalling election. Which is better than tRump destroying the place, but still…..
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: So you view a potential Trump Presidency(I just threw up in my mouth a bit) more in the organizational style of the Nixon Presidency?
hovercraft
@JMG: @pluky:
Margie Omero was on Chris Hayes, and she suggested looking at this piece from RCP by Doug Rivers about the fluctuations in the polls.
It’s a long read, his bottom line seems to be that when bad shit happens, they aren’t actually losing support, they are just more inclined to not respond to pollsters. So maybe the people freaking out should calm down. The PDF file seems to show that the freakout after the first debate in 2012 , and the tightening in the polls was largely a mirage. Then again you can manipulate data to make it show anything, so who knows. If it helps calm you take a look, if not cute pet videos.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Not necessarily. I just think unless they put say Bannon or Kushner in charge of transition, that it will be someone with some political administrative experience – hence Christie for now as he’s a governor. Provided the transition chief is a professional, despite being a partisan, they will no better than to put in a SecDef who is a peer to all the senior uniformed personnel (general officers/flag officers) as his peers will know all about him. It makes it too easy to sabotage him. As does the fact that all the senior civil servants will too (SESes and GS 15s and 14s). Putting him in as SecDef would, essentially, be asking for an internal war within the Pentagon.
p.a.
@Major Major Major Major: Well, I’ll take him if I can get him of course, but you and I both know it’ll be like wanting that nice cold glass of milk with a chocolate chip cookie, but then when you pour it it’s chunky.
Ruckus
@sigaba:
Republicans lose their luster? Remember they don’t want any type of government that works. They want what they want, and those things are that only whites have the vote, have the money, have the freedom, have the ability to breathe…… The rest should be slaves that pay all the costs and sleep out in fields when they aren’t getting beaten.
PM Ryan? That’s a wet dream for them.
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: “Kill the Feral Cats” is a good example of Loomis’s sometimes irritating tendency to spice up mostly well-reasoned or at least not absurd arguments with flame bait pronouncements. He’s talking about a specific situation where killing feral cats might well be the best option, but uses it to go off on the irrationality of some pet lovers and pokes at them in the title. Once he got a good argument going by calling for a total ban on remote-controlled aircraft (he has a strong Luddite streak).
PaulWartenberg2016
@burnspbesq:
I hope that means the citizenry can now F-CKING VOTE LIKE THEY SHOULD without harrassment or BS.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: I wasn’t clear in what I meant, I mean the palace guard or kitchen cabinet(in Nixon’s case: Chief of Staff, Appointments Secretary, and National Security Advisor) controlling access to the President.
Major Major Major Major
@p.a.: the alternative of course being a glass of shredded tire rims with an anthrax garnish.
I just thought you picked a funny example.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Matt McIrvin:
He can try to pry my drone controller from my cold dead hands.
sigaba
@Ruckus:
The US is the only advanced liberal country organized as a Presidential Republic. It’s an utterly failing model everywhere else.
I know what Trump and Ryan want, and what they would do, and that is enough for me to make a decision about my vote. I have very little idea what sort of world all his voters would live in, if they were the king. You can see Trump as either the ultimate victory of the racist/antitgoverment worldview over the Republican party, or as the utter bankruptcy of the Whiggist/Movement Conservative worldview. I believe it is more the latter than the former.
PS. The Clinton campaign has emailed, texted or called me 10 times today.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major:
Sounds yummy!
dww44
@Monala: I must swim in the same milieu as you. Today I went to the offices of my former employer. It’s a branch office of a national financial services firm, so the fact that 98% of them are hard core red state Republicans is no surprise. But when a former female co-worker, once under my supervision, asked me which person I was going to vote for, “the criminal or the sex obsessed other candidate”. I replied that Hillary Clinton is not a criminal and she will make a good if not a great President.
I told her I was coming home and would be sharing a link to this piece I read yesterday. If you are anxious about the election, as presumably many of us are (thanks, Comey) please read this Hillary Clinton endorsement by John Scalzi. It’s the best one I’ve read and it’s chock full of stuff with which to rebut the HRC naysayers.
Matt McIrvin
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, it went about like that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@sigaba:
They sound, eh, friendly.
schrodinger's cat
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Friendly like a stalker?
sigaba
@Ruckus:
I’ll happily vote to keep Paul Ryan out of power, I’m not going to organize the government in such a way that it’s impossible for him to be in power, if the people really want him.
And yeah, I know, the Republicans absolutely would organize government around the principles of keeping liberals out of power. That’s what makes me a liberal, and that’s what makes them a conservative. Conservatives don’t believe that government arise from the will of the people and the consent of the governed, it should be based around the maintenance of eternal ideological conceits and that popular will must be, at best, tolerated.
Kay
Good piece explaining what’s going on with the Democrats suing the Republicans:
Trump running his mouth about “rigged elections” brought this consent decree to everyone’s attention. I’m sure the RNC doesn’t want that, because of course it’s just shameful that they have to abide by a consent decree where they are forbidden from bothering people when people go to vote :)
There’s another, different lawsuit in Ohio where Democrats are trying to get the same thing- consent decree extended- but they’re using a different route to get there.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@schrodinger’s cat: Hence the “eh”.
JCJ
@Mary G: That is why she is low drag. You wouldn’t believe the amount of wind resistance those things have!
sigaba
@dww44:
I feel like movement leftists have really devalued the meaning of “criminal,” particularly by implying that a lot of people who were never convicted of anything are criminals.
Hillary Clinton has never been convicted of a crime, or even indicted, this is true. The CEO of Wells Fargo hasn’t been either. I think when people call Hillary a criminal, the mean it in the sense that Wells Fargo is criminal, as in, nothing is proven and they used some legal chicanery to get out of it… Which isn’t really falsifiable. And this bothers me because I do want to vindicate her.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yep. I would expect Bannon, Kushner, Flynn, and Stephen Miller to be the gatekeepers. The latter is Senator Sessions’ Senator Sessions and is on loan to Trump from Senator Sessions’ office. I would expect that there will be some obvious hand out positions for Guilianni and Gingrich and Christie (depending on Bridgegate), but given the way Trump operates he may just stuff one or all of them. I can see Gingrich getting stiffed for being too independent. And Christie just for shits and giggles. Guilianni he owes for not pursuing an investigative lead into him laundering money for the mob in the 1980s after Trump started bundling donations for Guilianni’s mayoral run:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/26/inside-donald-trumps-empire-why-he-wont-run-for-president.html
Omnes Omnibus
@JCJ:
Some do, and some don’t.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: He’s already on record going after Wayne LaPierre, so watch your back…
(he was, of course, speaking both hyperbolically and metaphorically – not seriously)
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Better preserve all those communications in case the FBI folks need to see them as part of the ongoing inquiry.
sigaba
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s probably because I’m a weekly donor…
@Ruckus: You know, I would add the simple fact that most Republicans absolutely despise Ryan. Most Republicans despise all their elected members. They’ll vote for them as long as they on the right side of the endorsers and as long as they do every little vote the right way, but as far as conservative voters are concerned politicians are just a means to an end. Most of them win their district because of the letter after their name, apart from that most of these people don’t know their congressman’s name.
Ryan is a wet dream as long as he’s not realized. But it’s a movement– as soon as Ryan’s power is real he ceases to be Conservative Enough and the voters move to someone else.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Your comment reminded me something Major x4 wrote to a new troll who had puked up some comment in the past couple of days – I believe the exact quote was “You seem nice.” I laughed out loud.
Mnemosyne
@Latino J:
Slight correction — at least half of the USA had an official, enshrined in law caste system until 1964. It’s only been officially unofficial since then.
Interesting factoid I picked up on PBS: in Texas, Jim Crow laws applied to Latin@s, not just African-Americans.
sigaba
@Mnemosyne: Particularly funny considering latinos were there first and contributed significantly to the war against Santa Ana.
Darker factoid, also learned on PBS: It was routine through the 1970s, in California, for county hospitals to sterilize latina women without their consent.
NW Phil
@sigaba:
The process she will use is called politics. Has been used quite effectively in the past.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman:
Interesting read.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I quoted Adam’s link to the Daily Beast and got sent to detention. It’s a good read Adam, I’m amazed that Trump hasn’t served time.
Ruckus
@sigaba:
Here’s where I think you’ve gone a bit off the rails. Those two things are not opposites, they sound slightly different but really they are one and the same thing. They may have been slightly different at one point in time but no longer. That’s why tRump has the support that he has, the two possible descriptions of the conservative side of the aisle have merged into one fucking mess.
ETA just saw your email #. Only 10? Such a light day!
Matt McIrvin
@sigaba: Virginia was involuntarily sterilizing the “feeble-minded” under an official eugenics program into the early Seventies. The law was based on a model statute that Hitler cited as inspiration.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: I think it was ‘pleasant’.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’ve freed you. That wasn’t even the actual article I was referring to, but was the only one I could find. I think I’m actually looking for a David Cay Johnston article where he recounts how, as Guilianni was ramping up to run for mayor, Trump started throwing fundraisers for him. When Guilianni’s investigators nabbed a mob guy who offered to turn on Trump for money laundering for the mob in exchange for a reduced sentence, Guilianni had his lead investigator first look into it and then bury it. They’ve been tightly connected ever since.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne:
In much of the West (maybe elsewhere) there were similar segregation laws applied to Native Americans. My dad remembers feeling morally superior to Southerners for treating black people that way while finding it perfectly natural that the Native Americans in his town were treated as subhuman, until somebody actually pointed out the contradiction.
sigaba
@Matt McIrvin: I sorta feel like the California instance is worse than Virginia or North Carolina. In VA and NC they had laws and review boards and bureaucracy.
In California doctors did it without any orders or legal instructions whatsoever, it was just sortof a wink and nudge between all the ER and OB attending and the nurses, as if this were the sort of thing not formulated by racist legislators, but coworkers over coffee. (For some reason I keep imagining Dr. Kelly Bracket and Nurse McCall from Emergency! conducting surreptitious tubal ligations.)
When, in this case, County-USC Medical Center was sued, their defense was “the doctors felt that poor people were having too many children and were a burden on society and welfare.” AND THE DOCTORS WON THE LAWSUIT WITH THAT ARGUMENT, and the judge specifically cited their rational as valid as long as their “persuasion” of their non-English-speaking patients did not “overwhelm” them.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: Well, dammit, I still liked it! so much for my exact quote…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: I didn’t see anything about Ghoulliani but still an interesting piece, Ivanka comes off as a ‘chip of the ol’ block’.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Ever since Christie mentioned undoing the civil service regulations and purging the whole government of Obama appointees, I’ve pretty much assumed it would be something like the administration of post-invasion Iraq, cranks and cronies just flooding in to run everything based on some half-assed theory out of Atlas Shrugged.
sigaba
@Matt McIrvin: Christie would make a good Roscoe Conkling.
Matt McIrvin
@sigaba: The thing is, there’s no easy way to come back from that, because so much talent would just be removed. It’s one of the scariest possibilities of a Trump Administration and it didn’t even come from Trump, it came from a supposedly sane Republican. Gingrich is keen on it too. They’re bringing back the pre-Chester Alan Arthur spoils system.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
The night George W Bush was re-elected I was in Texas, staying with my brother. I was there because our Dad had been in hospice after fighting Leukemia for years. (His diagnosis came with a mean survival time of 9 months, so he fought the good fight!)
Dad died at 1 the afternoon of election day, 2004. The day George W was re-elected. We were really prepared, he was mostly already gone. My brother and I are as different as UV light and IR. If not moreso than that. But we agree on many things, like funeral rites (no use for them, mostly) and family deaths.
As we watched the election results that night, I was just really hoping so hard that my brother, a real Texas Republican, wouldn’t try to get one over me about the election. And I will always be grateful that he didn’t say a word, other than good night, sleep well.
We will never have the close relationship we had when we were young, as he is deep into the Boy Scout cult and the RWNJ political world. But we can stand to be together and do the things we used to do, without talking about politics, or the BSA. Which is better than nothing.
Election day 2004 will always be one of the darkest days of my life, though. Just piled up on me, and many others.
Edit to add: I really like most of the posters at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Even the founder, Farley, who knows a lot about international security issues. There’s a lot of good music, labor politics and union history, and plain old left-wing politics. I comment more here at B-J than I do over there, threaded comments, plus you have to log in and remember a password if you move to another computer.
But it’s a good place, you should try it for a while.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Found it!
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/wayne-barrett-donald-trump-rudy-giuliani-peas-pod-article-1.2776357
Read the whole thing. I knew it was a Wayne Barrett article, just took a bit of advanced google-fu to find it!
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Christie conflated two different things. All Obama appointees, basically these are Administration positions outside of the civil service, will go automatically. With a couple of caveats. Some may have exemption to policy carve outs in their appointment paperwork allowing them to directly transition into an equivalent civil service billet or requiring them to do so as their appointments require an equivalent minimum term of service within the civil service.
This is separate from doing away with the civil service laws, and the Federal regulations based on them. This would actually require changing the laws through Congress. If Christie thinks this is a smart fight to pick, he’s an idiot. You do NOT mess with the people that have the ability to completely grind everything, and I mean everything, to a halt. We are in need of some smart civil service reform (discussion for another day), especially at the upper ranks (GS 12s and higher), but that’s something that should be enabled by law to happen on a regular basis under a Federal commission composed of a variety of specialists, including representatives for the civil servants themselves.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: Yep that sounds like a tough one. This election is stirring up a lot of memories. Thanks for sharing yours, I always appreciate your stories.
I have a sister like that. We mostly just agree to disagree about politics and abortion, but occasionally she slips in some crack about all the babies that are being murdered. For a moment, I usually feel like murdering her, but I just get off the phone pretty quickly, don’t make contact for a few days, and then forget about it. I’m the worst grudge-holder ever.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: (Contemplates the joy of being an only child.)
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
Best of luck.
Will you save much money on flashlight batteries? Glowing could be a good thing if you could turn it up and down. ;-)
Hope it really worked out for you, and is obvious about it soonest!!
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: ha ha. As with everything else, siblings are a mixed bag. Nobody can push your buttons like a sibling!
Nettoyeur
@JMG: Nate Silver was great at the NYT, but now under profits pressure on ESPN, he has produced a lot of click bait to keep people coming. Wang beat him on accuracy in 2012, with a lot less verbiage.
Larkspur
@Matt McIrvin: There’s an interesting book on exactly that subject: War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black, Dialog Press (2012).
WarMunchkin
Really puts the whole “America is great because America is good” thing to question, doesn’t it.
dww44
@WaterGirl: Agree about the comment section, but the most well-known anti-Hillary, die hard Bernie supporter, has been taken to task, so to speak, by Booman in the comment section and has been way less present of late. Perhaps Booman realized that many readers had been driven away by that cadre of commenters for whom Abraham Lincoln or Jesus Christ himself would never measure up as the purity candidate of their dreams. Plus so many of them are just plain depressing to read..
sigaba
@J R in WV:
Speaking as a Life Scout, I am very annoyed with what has happened to the BSA in the last 20 years. It all started with the Gay Purge.
Steeplejack (phone)
@WaterGirl:
Some other person did use that exact phrase before.
WaterGirl
@dww44: Good to know. Do you recall the name? It seemed like there were several who fit that description over the past few months. But maybe I’ll give it another try.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You all are missing the real thing here – political parties are about electing a president to get policy done and all the GOP has is hate. That’s it. The GOP is dead but it limbs haven’t stopped moving.
TriassicSands
I want the election over because the longer the campaign goes on the better are the chances that Trump will win. Clinton has been falling like a rock on 538 for the past two weeks. On October 17, 538 gave Clinton a better than 88% chance of winning. Two weeks later she down to 67.7%. One last October surprise could put the sociopath in office.
low-tech cyclist
Or how about, we’ve been confronted with it all year. It’s not like it’s possible to be in denial about it at this point. But we’re way overdue to have a break from having it forced in our face, even if we’re still gonna need to deal with it. We need to be able to not have to think about it every freakin’ day and every freakin’ night.
This political junkie is quite aware of what’s going on, and what the stakes are. But he’s just plain worn out.