It goes like this:
1.) Anger
2.) More Anger
3.) Fuck You
4.) Random lashing out
5.) Fuck you and anger and lashing out
On the upside, we now know how the Idiocracy will finally end- fracking in the Yellowstone caldera:
Rather than continuing the current path to undermine and block America’s fossil fuel producers, the Trump Administration will encourage the production of these resources by opening onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands and waters. We will streamline the permitting process for all energy projects, including the billions of dollars in projects held up by President Obama, and rescind the job-destroying executive actions under his Administration. We will end the war on coal, and rescind the coal mining lease moratorium, the excessive Interior Department stream rule, and conduct a top-down review of all anti-coal regulations issued by the Obama Administration. We will eliminate the highly invasive “Waters of the US” rule, and scrap the $5 trillion dollar Obama-Clinton Climate Action Plan and the Clean Power Plan and prevent these unilateral plans from increasing monthly electric bills by double-digits without any measurable effect on Earth’s climate. Energy is the lifeblood of modern society. It is the industry that fuels all other industries. We will lift the restrictions on American energy, and allow this wealth to pour into our communities. It’s all upside: more jobs, more revenues, more wealth, higher wages, and lower energy prices.
Fuck.
Jeffro
But he’s talking about clean coal, Cole
Major Major Major Major
I feel so bad for Hillary. I know she’ll be fine and there are much worse things but I just feel so bad. I mean she spent her whole life clawing her way up only to lose the final boss fight to a trash monster.
Amanda in the South Bay
Mind involve mostly nausea, vomiting, getting a bug out bag ready, and trying to not hurt myself.
JordanRules
@Major Major Major Major: Same.
Tenar Darell
Looks like I better get to Yellowstone before they lease it all or sell the Park back to the state. *sob*
narya
My list is similar, except it also includes ranting.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Today would be a good day for the Yellowstone Caldera to blow, since we’ve already had a meteor strike.
A dear friend just told me that a mutual college friend of ours died today after being sick for quite awhile, and my first thought was that he picked a good time to die, and at the risk of sounding too melodramatic, I would make that choice too, rather than being forced to watch what comes next.
Nunca El Jefe
Oooh, it’s all upside. Sounds so businessy. What was the name of the town whose running water was contaminated by the methylcyclohexanol? Upside!?
SenyorDave
I thought the US is already energy independent. And I almost forgot, the emails
clay
They forgot to mention more unicorns and rainbows and bigger genitalia for all!!
GailVortex
“it’s all upside.”
If you believe your grandkids want leveled mountains, unlivable ground and polluted water.
GrandJury
Trickle down. We all know how that went. This is just the beginning folks. Fasten your seat belts.
debit
Fossil fuel is cheap right now. Why would he want to drive down the price even more? I assumed his puppet masters would have a problem with that.
Emerald
@Major Major Major Major:
Me too. What that lady has endured!
She needs to either leave the country, or Obama must pardon her for whatever, because if she allows herself to becomes the defendant in trump’s (no more caps for the shitgibbon—waste of electronic ink) atrocity of a show trial it will merely serve to normalize him.
But the lady never quits. She could become an effective spokesperson against his regime. As Al Gore redeemed himself with his fight for the climate, so could she in continuing to fight for her causes. She’ll just have to do it outside this country.
(edited for grammar)
Thoroughly Pizzled
Sick of the barely concealed gloating by Bernie supporters.
And even more disgusted by the people who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump but now that there’s all these protests and opposition to him and insults to his supporters well gosh I think we should get behind our president. Now show me your papers.
WereBear
Maybe time to declare a General Strike. Works in France.
Corner Stone
My God. The horror and enormity of what white people have done is revealing itself already. And the tragedy is there are 50M+ or so that are probably cheering this proclamation.
SenyorDave
On the emails subject. I work with someone whose husband is in cyber-security (or as Trump says, the cybers). He is ex-military, usually votes Republican but didn’t this election. He knows someone who worked on Clinton’s emails. He told her its all a bunch of BS, there are generals, very high level NSA workers who use personal email all the time. He said some of the NSA software used to protect servers is 20 years old, and they use google or yahoo mail because its better. His comment was that the only way she could be in trouble is if she was caught in a lie, because everyone does the same thing.
debit
And weirdly enough, I’ve reached numb acceptance. There’s nothing to do to change it in the here and now, so we just have to endure until we can change it.
Shell
Floating around is the idea that if the Electoral college votes in enough numbers for Hillary or abstains, she can still win the White House. And her win of the popular vote could puncture the argument that they’re flouting the will of the people.
Sorry, but thats never gonna happen. Just like that ‘Dump-Trump campaign right after the primaries.
John
I wonder if the GOP will nominate a literal pile of shit in 2024? Maybe they could dig up Mussolini’s moldering corpse and reanimate it somehow.
Kryptik
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m still not sure she’s going to be fine at all. Trump and company have made gestures to keep prosecuting her forever and anon.
Hal
Climate change denliast as head of EPA transition, and:
Served
@Corner Stone:
“I voted for it, so it must be good!”
Major Major Major Major
@Thoroughly Pizzled: “Sick of the barely concealed gloating by Bernie supporters.”
It was concealed?
Corner Stone
@debit:
Places like TX need it to be much closer to $80 BBL to generate sustained exploration and job growth. They can restart some proven fields at less than that but it really doesn’t do anything for the industry.
Tenar Darell
@Tenar Darell: well that’s weird- I did the ETA & it’s gone.
Something, something- next week’s King Tide clips of Boston Harbor feel more & more like they’ll be portents until & unless we win these next battles.
Bess
@WereBear:
My thought as well. Trump can only go so far. Try to trump up a charge to imprison Hillary and there would be millions in the streets and business would grind to a halt.
Elizabelle
@Major Major Major Major: With mainstream media giving a huge boost to the trash monster, because RATINGS.
When those fuckers show up on panels, regretting the very small part they will admit to playing in the 2016 elections, throw food at them.
Better yet, stop watching their twisted, inferior product. And tell the advertisers. Your eyeballs/money for a subscription is GONE, Girl.
Emerald
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
They will go away soon. They got nuthin’ to give anyone. Let ’em sit in their drum circles and spew their hatred to each other. Keeps them occupied with themselves and we can get on with an actual revolution (and keep them out of it—they will screw everything up).
Shell
And now, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance , school kids will now have to pledge to “The Art of The Deal.”
mai naem mobile
But remember Bernie Bros said Hillary was a lying bitch.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@debit:
Since when has Trump honored any debt to anyone?
Elizabelle
@Shell: But we are not the craven Republicans.
This man is not fit for office, and he’s a spite vote. By stupid people who cannot separate reality TV from reality, and are magical thinkers about the economy and other serious subjects.
If the Electors want to unseat him, far be it from us to scoff at that possibility.
ETA: Mind you, I think it’s a farflung possibility. But let’s not kill the idea in the crib.
bystander
My lashing out took the shape of stopping our NYTimes subscription. No more phony stories planted by “anonymous” sources and no more Maureed Dowd. We did sign up for WaPo, tho.
Kylroy
@Bess: I’m not so sure. Only fact that’s comforted me since his election is that there were five and a half years between the final Weimar election and Kristallnacht – history implies there will at least be some time before the fascism becomes total.
debit
@Shell:
With their hands on their pussy instead of their heart.
GrandJury
@WereBear: That’s not a bad idea actually. When the time is right. Maybe about 6 months. There should be multiple scandals by that time.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the shit stain in chief just up and resigns after a few scandals. Won’t happen with a complacent media though. I think the media is the key thing. If they play along like they did for G Dubya then we are truly fucked.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
So he’s already walked back the do away with the EPA? Now it’s Trump AWWWSOME EPA?
Poopyman
@John: Nope, sorry. Has to be native-born shit.
Gravenstone
@debit: Yeah, driving the price of crude down further will really endear him to Uncle Pooty Poot. Wonder if Putin has had him sized up for a pelletized ricin umbrella yet? Or maybe offer him a spot of polonium tea?
WereBear
@Elizabelle: The WereBear household has already gone to only internet television with no commercials. I agree that’s another good way to tell them how useless they are.
GrandJury
@Major Major Major Major: She’ll be fine. At her age she is probably relieved. Gets to spend more time with the grand kids.
Shalimar
You be you, Cole, as long as you don’t progress to:
6.) Blow shit up
Republicans are already doing enough of that for all of us.
Also, is it too early to predict that the Yellowstone SuperVolcano Eruption of 2018 will be Trump’s Katrina?
debit
@GrandJury: I have no doubt about the scandal. He has no idea how to conduct himself under the microscope of public life. He’ll grab someone by the pussy and force some slobbery kisses on her and it will be caught on camera. Will it make a difference? Who can say.
jackmac
@Corner Stone: Not all white people.
debit
Oh my god, I’m being moderated for the word pussy.
ETA: 40 minutes and I get to leave work to take Walter for his massage appointment. At this point it’s as much for me as it is for him.
Kylroy
@jackmac: Just *enough* white people.
GrandJury
@Nunca El Jefe: You referring to Hinkley from Erin Brockovich?
Ryan
Can Obama declare the United States a national park before he goes, please?
EBT
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: Of course. Any old republican with all the cards can kill the EPA. Trump can remold it and shove his name in there some where. America will have the yugest and most bigly beautiful government agencies on the planet.
Gravenstone
@Kylroy: Had a friend mention her sense of foreboding that election day came on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Can’t imagine she’s feeling any better about events in the aftermath.
Shell
@Shalimar: Add step 7. Post more renovation and pet pics.
Is there gonna be another Balloon Juice calendar?
Timurid
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
They WANT us dead. Fuck them.
Hitless
@Bess:
Really? I think that they could indict Hillary and the media would happily follow along (ratings!) and you’d hear a bunch of crap about “the rule of law” giving it the veneer of legality and 51% of the country would be too worried about their own lives to care while 49% would gleefully welcome the development.
Major Major Major Major
@jackmac: no, this one’s pretty squarely on white people. I say that as a white person.
James E Powell
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m sure she’ll be fine in the sense that she’s never going to want for money or friends. But I don’t see how she can recover from this emotionally or psychologically. They picked Trump instead of her. I don’t see how she can ever get over that. I don’t see how her inner circle & staff can ever not wake up wanting to scream. I don’t even see how I’m going to get over this. Everything I care about is going to be trashed because the FBI director hates Hillary Clinton.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
What happens if the Yellowstone Caldera blows up? Is he really proposing to let people fuck around under there?
low-tech cyclist
They have a site where you can make suggestions for how to Make America Great Again.
I proposed a $12/hour minimum wage, to put more money in the pockets of all working Americans. As I explained, corporations these days literally can’t find investments for their profits that have a decent rate of return, and that was because consumers didn’t have much money to spend, so there was no point in investing to make stuff to sell them. Make them pay workers more money, and the workers immediately get a boost, there are productive investments once again, and everybody wins!
Dunno what they do with these suggestions, but somehow I doubt that mine will go anywhere.
ruckus
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I’m hoping that I don’t have to make that decision. When the assholes privatize SS and cut the funding to the VA I’m totally fucked. Which makes the shop racist’s gloating all the more maddening. I hope that I can continue to convince myself that grabbing him by the throat for an hour or so isn’t the best idea.
Maybe, just fucking maybe enough will rise up enough stink to stop them. OK that was almost good enough for a giggle.
dance around in your bones
I just sent a ‘take pity on me, best friend!’ (who lives in BC Canada, OMG) and waiting to see if she even responds. Prolly inundated.
Also, to repeat from last thread:
Has anybody linked this yet? Gotta laugh where you can!
Mike Field
John Cole, I lurk here and have for years, religiously.
Thank you so much. Your mind and your passion and your humor are like a salve.
low-tech cyclist
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
The Age Of Man is over. It’s the fire’s turn.
/onlxn
debit
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Then our national nightmare will finally be over.
Corner Stone
@jackmac: You forgot the #, bro!
Ben Cisco
Still dazed and disgusted by the results of this election. I’m no noob, I’m a child of the 60s/70s and I’ve never had any illusions about where I stood in America. But to know there’s that many people who don’t even see me as an actual human being in fucking 2016 – so much so that they elected a living, breathing Klan cipher – sorry, they can fuck right off. I have no children to send to war, I already did my bit plus now I’m too old/broken and wouldn’t go anyway, and they can’t take my wife’s disability away from her ’cause she’s already dead.
Can’t wait to see whether or not the president-elect’s various manufacturing concerns make their way back to our shores from their various and sundry far-flung exotic locales. Wonder if any journalists will ask any questions about THOSE jobs.
MisterForkbeard
So, two things. One of these is possibly inspiring, another is my way of dealing with the grief we’ve all got there.
First, for grief and coping: I see lots of reactions all over facebook to Trump in general, and I see a lot like this. I see people defending their votes for Trump, Stein or Johnson and I get the feeling most of them had no idea what a Trump presidency actually entailed, and now they’re getting it from a lot of friends who are calling them racist, sexist assholes. I personally have 2-3 relatives I may remind every time we hear about some new Trump atrocity, something that’s going to happen literally every day for awhile with a unified republican government. But this does actually mean that I have some hope for the future: I’m already seeing a lot of people on defense or still blaming their Trump/Stein/Johnson vote on Hillary’s handling of Libya or whatever, and that sauce is so weak it’s already getting torn down. Likewise, I feel like it’s going to be longterm helpful to show people what the Republican Party actually is at this point. Clearly a Hillary president would have been vastly preferable to this clusterfuck, but we can repair most or all of it in time and even some of his supporters are already turning on him. It’s not hopeless, and we have a way forward.
And secondly, regarding Hope: On November 8th, 8:15pm right as it was becoming very obvious that Trump was going to win, my second daughter was born. We’d hoped for a better time – we’d even thought about naming her Hillary or Diane in honor of the first female president, elected on the day she was born. Instead, we named her Joy, for the feelings she brings us and the hope she brings us for the future. And you know what? She won’t be touched by all the fear and uncertainty we have today. And with hard work and determination, her fourth birthday will be just after the dawning of a new day in America, where the darkness and hatred of a Trump presidency is thrown out in favor of a new, better way.
We’re going to make all this work. We have to, for the future of our kids. And to paraphrase two particularly awesome democratic politicians: We’ll do it, because yes we fucking can, and we’re stronger together than we are apart. We’ll fix this.
THAT’s our promise.
Corner Stone
Just paid my homeowners insurance for next year. Kind of feel like a chump for making the whole payment, as I expect to be in a Re-Education Camp (REC) before the end of 2017.
My Truth Hurts
Oh but Berniebros are so rude. Fuck that guy, amirite?
Told ya so.
Told ya so.
Told ya so.
“It’s her turn!”
Fuckheads.
Shalimar
@Elizabelle: And none of the many unique personality flaws that make Trump a disastrous choice have even shown yet in any of the horrible announcements we have heard the last 2 days. A President-elect Cruz or President-elect Jeb! would have made all the same choices. This is who the whole party is.
gene108
@GailVortex:
Yours maybe, but their grandkids will be living wealthy enclaves untouched by the environmental disaster.
MomSense
We have to organize fast. The mofos who will come in to his administration have been planning for this for a long time. They will move fast. We have to start now organizing and carefully learning non violent resistance. Any violence will be all the justification needed for a massive crack down.
If we want to stop or slow the coming destruction we have to organize and plan and study and train ourselves now.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@MisterForkbeard:
God willing. And us doing. Thank you for this.
debit
@MisterForkbeard: That’s so lovely. Congrats on your beautiful daughter. I truly hope you’re right and that we can fix this.
Gravenstone
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Well, that would stop the fracking PDQ, now wouldn’t it?
Poopyman
Let us savor.
MisterForkbeard
@MomSense: David Clarke’s already saying they need to “crack down” on peaceful protests.
Honestly, these people are already so horrible I’m already seeing hints that the media is turning on them. They’re TRYING to normalize Trump but they just can’t quite do it.
My Truth Hurts
There was this one time over the summer in the ballon juice comments when I tried to warn people about ignoring and making fun of sanders supporters and one of you told me to kill myself.
To fucking kill myself bcause I pointed out Hillary probably can’t win. Then I was banned. Somehow I’m back. And I’m back to say
I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO YOU ARROGANT ASSHOLES.
Major Major Major Major
@James E Powell: yep. She’ll get to spend more time with her granddaughter–while she watches a trash monster deliberately dismantle her life’s work and every day wonder what she could have done differently.
Cermet
Worried about Hillary!? WTF?! She has hundreds of millions of dollars; fuck that. Worry about the vast number of people about to lose health care – and Hillary was responsible for her lost. We did our parts with money and voting. Worry how decades of hard, really hard to obtain rights and Fed regs will be lost because the dems have lost congress and the presidency! WTF!!! That is just the start – now the inferior court will be turned against us in a huge manner with a far right religious nutcase corporate cock sucking whore. All because Hillary couldn’t figure out what Micheal Moore had been saying for weeks – that is just beyond the pale and she, as well as the hugely well paid experts have ZERO EXCUSES for such a royal fuck up. We are the people who will suffer. People, get your heads on straight or the thugs will be fucking us for decades to come. The dems need to clean out all the rubbish that caters to the thugs and fight tooth and nail to undermine all they do (sound familar …lets see, they did that to the dems and sweep not just all branches of the Fed Government but control over 70% of the state houses and 31 Governorships !!!
Thoroughly Pizzled
@My Truth Hurts: Glad someone’s happy!
Shalimar
@My Truth Hurts: Berniebros are so incapable of anything constructive. If Bernie were like you assholes, I never would have supported him. Go get drunk. It can’t make you any more annoying.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
shit like this is happening all over the country. This happened in a fucking middle school. The 13 year olds are economically anxious
Corner Stone
@Hitless:
Absolutely. And play hours of Chaffetz savaging her on the most banal of routine shit. Who is going to stop them? Rep Cummings can object angrily all he likes. We already saw they can bend the FBI to do their bidding. The media isn’t going to do a damned thing. Public outcry? We couldn’t stop the Iraq War, not going to stop them from going after Crooked Hillary.
Timurid
@Shell:
The biggest problem with an Electoral College mutiny is the threat of violence. The mutineers would have to sleep with one eye open for the rest of their lives. Which is why the EC was pointless in 1787, much less today…
MisterForkbeard
@debit: It’s dark right now, but we’ve all got great things in our lives, and we fix these things for them. Even Walter (how he’s doing, by the way?) can be a source of strength and compassion so we remember what we’re fighting for.
This can all be fixed. We CAN do better. And we will.
catclub
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
I am in favor of getting behind Barack Obama.
WereBear
End of the world as we know it.
and
Yes.
Major Major Major Major
@My Truth Hurts: I’m assuming you were as charming then as you’re being now, and probably also said something racist or threatened a commenter personally since you got banned. Go fuck yourself. Plenty of people here make legitimate criticisms and are taken seriously and respected.
gene108
@Corner Stone:
Kill derivatives trading restrictions and speculators can drive up the price of oil again.
Problem of high output driving down cost is solved.
Captain C
@Emerald: Or just use ’em as cannon fodder. The ones with martyr complexes might actually like that.
rikyrah
I’m with your stages, Cole. They fit me fine
debit
@My Truth Hurts: Hey, why don’t you shove some shit in your festering gob? How about that? Does that work for you? Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt your tiny little baby feelings? Then please feel free to fuck off somewhere else.
Shalimar
@My Truth Hurts: People ignored you and made fun of you when you said in the summer that she can’t win? What good would it have done to listen to you? Did you have an alternative that actually had any chance of happening? Did you have any constructive criticism that would have improved her chance of winning? Or were you just an asshole saying “I told you so” just like now?
Major Major Major Major
@Cermet: who said they were worried about Hillary?
ruckus
@MisterForkbeard:
Congratulations!!!!
Here’s hoping that your wife and daughter are doing great.
Your hope that a lot of people may see that their decision was fucked up, to say the least is one I share. Not that I think it might have any positive effect.
Barbara
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: Well, I woke up last night with the thought that he might actually abolish the EPA. So, you know . . .
lollipopguild
@John: Trump will declare National Martial Law(TM) and cancel all elections. Trump is El Presidente for Life(TM).
dance around in your bones
Great video, BTW.
Years ago my DDH (dear departed husband) and I went to a concert where some friends were opening for more well-known acts. We had the privilege of standing onstage in the wings watching them and later this guy mumbling and growling while leaning against a light pole. He was unintelligible, but I like Tom Waits! Just couldn’t understand what the fuck he was say/singing.
rikyrah
We already see the earthquakes happening in places like Oklahoma.
Fracking in Yellowstone??
Yeah, what could go wrong……
Poopyman
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): IING, but I think the odds of finding oil in a caldera are pretty, um, remote.
We know the Republicans don’t give a shit about science, but the oil companies sure do, and they aren’t going to waste their time with dry holes. I have faith, however, that Big Oil will only have to point to a patch of land and the Trump Administration will make it happen.
Omnes Omnibus
@My Truth Hurts: Well, you showed us. Are you happy now?
WereBear
I am certain that a lot of Trump voters did not think through their choice to a logical conclusion, because they never do, it’s just not part of their skill set.
And something like 27% thought they were voting for a new reality show.
Shalimar
@WereBear: On a positive note, maybe a massive volcanic explosion that blocks out the sun for a few years is Trump’s plan for combatting global warming. And people were saying he didn’t have one.
Captain C
@Emerald:
I have a friend who tried to finance his protest tourism trip to the DNC in Philly (made $50 out of his $1000 or so on IndieGoGo) under the name “Political Woodstock.” It reeked of unseriousness.
catclub
@MisterForkbeard:
NPR this morning was going into the list of things that Trump will fuck up (or it sure sounded that way to me). Too bad they could not do that before the election.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
posted on Medium
WereBear
@Shalimar: Now that’s some quantum level Pollyanna-ing. Well done!
Elizabelle
@MisterForkbeard: Congratulations! And may it be so, that we’ve got America back on the right track before young Joy is old enough for school.
debit
@MisterForkbeard: Walter is doing great. He’s moving without gimping anymore and has a massage appointment this afternoon. He also licked my face and neck when I was crying and put a paw on my knee, trying to comfort me. He’s been one of the few happy making things around me. So glad John sent him my way.
MomSense
@Corner Stone:
There’s still two months for Obama to declare martial law!
Tim F.
Amusingly, that policy will drive Russia insane. Our gas production has ruined Putin’s monopoly on European consumers.
Betsy
@Major Major Major Major: This.
Oh hey, I need to know what my personal word salad is. (I don’t actually want to know. But I think I probably *need* to know.)
Cermet
@Major Major Major Major: I read two posts up thread that were saying as much; no matter, doesn’t change my points at all.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Another block of Hamilton tickets on sale. Keep trying, Hamilfans.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Too bad Michael Moore has spent twenty years discrediting himself before he found that nut
James E Powell
@Corner Stone:
They didn’t bend the FBI. Comey and the FBI were more than willing to jump in to destroy Clinton. They did what they wanted to do and got what they wanted to get.
Captain C
@Gravenstone: Given Trump’s unknown but probable health state, I’d think it would be natural-appearing heart attack.
rikyrah
@Emerald:
Obama does need to pardon her.
MomSense
@catclub:
Yes Fuck Nice Polite Republicans. I wrote to them telling them no more money from me. But they get plenty of cash from the Koch brothers so I doubt they’ll mind.
Jeffro
@Corner Stone:
The stories we’re hearing from schools in the area and across the country of students acting horribly (bullying, using racist language, telling everyone darker than ivory that they’re about to be deported) are truly chilling. I feel for the school principals and teachers who are having to deal with this crap and discipline these kids, only to get the Trumpista parents showing up the next morning at their door.
MisterForkbeard
@ruckus: It’s a long-term hope. I would rather we could do it through careful careful explanation and discussion, but some people are still convinced that Hillary was incredibly corrupt but can’t say how, or are trying to justify their vote against her in other, vapid ways.
The thing is: Most of those arguments against Hillary were horrible to begin with. But if someone WANTS to hate, and they have some Steiniac/Johnsite/Trumpkin continually telling them they’re making the right decision, or an awful media telling them that both candidates are Just Awful, it’s a lot harder to get them to see reason. With Trump actually in office, this is incredibly hard to pretend, and the “Democrats are bad” stuff is going to get a lot less tenable. And just like in 2008, it’ll be very obvious to the whole country who screwed up America.
Except that Trump won’t (God willing) have a 9/11 to prop him up. It’s important to realize how bad GWB was, even in the beginning. He was looking corrupt and weak before that tragedy saved his presidency, and Trump isn’t going to get even the honeymoon period Bush had. He’s going to get pretty unpopular, and probably quickly.
And thank you for asking! The kid and the wife are doing great. Brought them both home today, and they’re napping in the other room.
catclub
@James E Powell:
More people voted for her than for Trump. They picked her.
The electoral college strikes again. twice in 17 years. And things worked out so well the last time it struck.
Elizabelle
@MomSense: Agreed.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@MisterForkbeard: Amen.
We can get through this. It’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be ugly, but we’ll come out on the other side. Not all of us, to be sure. Many of us will suffer and struggle and even die needlessly, and my soul aches for them. On a purely selfish note, never have I felt so thankful for my unasked-for accident of birth. I’m a straight, white Protestant guy who grew up in a stable household to a mother and father who both had been to college, and who each had a mother and father who both went to college, and on back, nearly ad infinitum. My father had a good job at one of the best colleges in the country, and I got to go there for one fourth the price. I’ve had all the breaks. I’ll be all right, as will my wife and our two little girls. But far too few of us are as lucky as I am. They’re going to get fucked, good and hard. I only hope they all can make it through in one piece, but, sadly, that won’t happen for all of them, and I weep for that. Many of these people who get reamed are going to be among the morans who voted for Trump, and, while there’s a bit of satisfying irony in that, in the end, I get no happiness from that sad truth.
But whatever happens to the unlucky among us, as a whole, we’ll make it through. This society will still be here in four years, or even eight, if it comes to that. Thee will be an ungodly, smoldering, reeking vast heap of shit to clean up, but, hey, we’re Democrats. We’re used to that. We’ve cleaned up somebody else’s shitheaps before, and we can do it once again when we’re called upon to, as we inevitably will be.
In the meanwhile, what really worries me is our lack of a bench. We have far fewer young, ambitious Democrats working their way up the chain. More than anything else over the next few years–scratch that. As well as doing everything else we have to do over the next two years to keep our vulnerable fellow citizens safe, we need to be looking for and finding the people who will run this country over the next 20 or 40 years. Clinton is 69. She’s done. Most of our big personalities lately are up there, too. Warren is 67. Al Franken is 65, I think. Sherrod Brown is 60-odd years old. Sanders is 75. We need to be bringing up our own Rubios, our own Cruzes, our own Cottons–only ours won’t be psychopaths and weasels. Chris Murphy is only 40-45. I can’t think of anybody else with any kind of profile who is my age or younger. That has to change. Kander is one. He lost, but that doesn’t mean it’s over for him, but he isn’t enough. We need to find these people now, starting today.
Captain C
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Shades of Little Rock, circa 1957.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@debit: Walter is a very special little beast indeed. I’m glad you and he have each other.
On a related note, I used to joke that my dogs were my substitute kids. Then on election night I found myself sad about the world we were creating for them. They’re dogs! They don’t care!
I won a bodhrán in a silent auction at an Irish festival last weekend. Gonna go pound on it now.
ruckus
@Cermet:
This is fucking bullshit. Hillary Clinton didn’t do this. Republicans did this. The people who wouldn’t get off their asses to fucking vote did this. Both were aided by the media.
Racists did this.
Misogynists did this.
Assholes did this.
But Hillary didn’t do this
EBT
@My Truth Hurts: Fuck you and fuck the rich fake socialist you rode in on you sanctimonious piece of shit.
MomSense
@MisterForkbeard:
Wow. Yes they will move fast. The people behind him have been planning for this for a long time.
Elizabelle
@debit: Walter is such a gentleman.
I love hearing of his massage appointments.
Corner Stone
@Enhanced Voting Techinques:
Doesn’t have to. Just do what they did to the IRS and SEC.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I told my husband that my greatest fear is that Trump will do nothing for these so called distressed white working class voters but will instead keep them keyed up by giving them permission to openly taunt and hurt African Americans and Latinos, and probably others. Making racism respectable. It just hurts, even though it is not being directed at people like me. I told my son that he needed to remember that while we are disappointed with the outcome, other people are frightened and he needs to be kind and supportive for them.
catclub
@Tim F.:
Do we have sufficient export capacity to matter to Europe? Do we even have sufficient pipeline capacity to keep prices even in the Northeast US?
James E Powell
@catclub:
“More people voted for her than for Trump.”
That is a footnote that will not give her one moment of comfort.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@EBT: Yeah, well when somebody posts under the name of “My Truth Hurts,” you kind of know more or less what you’re dealing with…
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Shaun King @ShaunKing 1h1 hour ago
Just expressing their economic anxiety. ;-)
jenn
I went to bed last night, determined that I will fight to hold on to whatever we can hold on to.
I woke up sobbing this morning.
I’m now back to angry, determined to fight to hold on to whatever we can hold on to.
I have the feeling that this is going to be an ongoing cycle for the next 2-4 years. Among the many things that I thought about this morning during my fountain of tears is that every bit of cash that I can scrape together is going to outfits that work to fight for the things in America that I hold most dear. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for one. I’m also going to sign on to some of the traditionally Republican-leaning conservation groups, like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Ducks Unlimited. I cannot see them handing over public lands without a fight. Groups that will work on voter suppression fights – at both the level of the courts and at the ground level of going door to door and making sure that the people who are eligible to vote have help navigating the bullshit to beat whatever is standing in their way. NAACP. Any suggestions for other groups? I’ve already invested in enormous bags of beans and rice. That’s what I’m going to be living off of for the next couple of years, so that I can afford to send that extra out there to do whatever good it can. :*) I’m also going to send money to WaPo (between the 2 “papers of record,” what I saw of their coverage of the dangers of Trump was far better), the Atlantic (Serwer, Fallows, Coates), MoJo – along with a letter outlining my thoughts about the current state of the media, and what I’m looking for from them if they ever want me to give them more money. I’ll also be walking into my local Democratic office, and figuring out how all this works into the leadup for the 2018 election.
Iowa Old Lady
@debit: Thanks for the news of Walter. There’s a story with a genuine happy ending.
Major Major Major Major
@Betsy: huh?
MisterForkbeard
@catclub: Yeah. I actually tried to go through his policy list awhile back with some facebook friends, and got told I was “fear-mongering”. Heh. They’re not pulling that now. Absolutely would have been better if NPR/the media had done this earlier.
There was a real lack of understanding amongst most of Trump’s supporters that I talked to (and I used to engage quite a bit on /r/politicaldiscussion on Reddit) about what policy does, or how it would actually affect them. I think they’re about to get a class on it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So much for the Pivoting
Jeffro
@GrandJury:
What exactly in SSIC’s behavior during the primary or general (or his entire life, really) gives us a sense that he’d walk away from power under any circumstances? Heck he could get impeached and convicted, and he’d still be trying to hang on to the desk as they pulled him out of the Oval Office.
Many outlets in the media went-full bore on his many flaws – Newsweek was all over the Russia connections, the Post was all over the assaults and Foundation scandals, and so on. It didn’t work. The stuff his Clown Brigade is about to get up to will probably blow our minds, so we’ll just have to hope it’s both so obvious and so criminal that when Trump’s AG ignores it, the rest of the country turns out in the following election.
gene108
One problem Democrats / liberals face is trying to get people to care about things that are just abstract concepts to them.
Mountain top removal for coal mining or fracking and other things do not impact people in most parts of the country. Their lives will go on as normal, even if someone in rural West Virginia can no longer drink or bath in their tap water.
Hell, Flint’s water problem didn’t spark any kind of national outrage.
Same goes with something like healthcare reform. Many middle-class people, even those who vote for Democrats, are not familiar with people on Medicaid, who cannot work because they’d lose their healthcare as soon as they got a job (in the pre-ACA era and non-expansion states). Not having health insurance through your employer and having to worry about paying medical bills is an abstract concept, so they do not understand why Democrats have made it such a priority.
I’m not sure how to get people to connect how these things would impact their daily lives anymore. But it was done once, which is why we ended up with the EPA and Medicare/Medicaid, in the first place.
Daulnay
@Emerald:
Indeed, let’s make our tent smaller. Who else can we throw out? How about those blacks that didn’t turn out for Hillary in large enough numbers? Or maybe all the white working class people who did vote for Hillary, because you know, they’re all closet racists anyway.
debit
@Daulnay: That’s bullshit and you know it.
ETA: Seriously, I am so sick of this shit. You guys come in here and crow about being right and how we were wrong when there is no indication Bernie could have won. You contribute nothing. NOTHING. You are dancing on the grave of our country and want us to drop to our knees and suck your dick and beg you to come back. Well, fuck you. If you didn’t vote to keep Trump out of office, this is on you. So why don’t you suck MY (metaphorical) dick?
Kylroy
@Gravenstone: Again, I’m trying to look at this in light of history. Pretending that the threat of outright fascism doesn’t exist is foolish, but so is running abroad this instant. My wife and I are cutting our spending to build up savings – if Trump is just another crappy R politician, we have more money available, and if he’s not, we have significant liquid assets to aid a move to Canada.
kindness
@My Truth Hurts:
Whiney Ass Titty Baby. Go fuck off and die. Feel better now?
Redshift
@Barbara: That’s what a lot of them want. That’s why all the “you should have sympathy for Trump supporters” articles pissed me off, because liberals have been trying to do things to help them for decades, and they vote for people who fight us tooth and nail. All of these authors tied themselves in knots trying to avoid saying two things:
1. They don’t like the way things have changed; they don’t want help dealing with it, they want it changed back.
2. The country they “want back” is one where no matter how bad they have it, they can be assured that “those people” have it worse.
We’re never going to give them those, so they’ll continue to vote for the people who lie to them and say they will.
Tenar Darell
@Elizabelle: Only cable news network I listen to is MSNBC. & I was planning on breaking-up with Rachel Maddow’s podcast version of the news/opinion. She was all horse-race & counterfactuals for the past weeks, to the point that I would ffwd thru the podcast looking for actual reporting/news. I suppose she deserves the courtesy of closure & an explanation why she’s losing a listener.
Mnemosyne
I’m getting some comfort out of reminding my cousin in Wisconsin that she chose to vote for the candidate who preached division and hatred, so she doesn’t get to whine about how angry and divided people are. That’s helping.
Major Major Major Major
@gene108: meanwhile, we spent all our healthcare time focusing on the relatively tiny number of people who were buying on the exchanges, above the subsidy line, but not making quite enough to afford a bronze plan.
Daulnay
@EBT:
Yes. This has some Republicans worried.
Jeffro
@MisterForkbeard: thanks for this – very inspiring! We’ll be right there with you.
James E Powell
@Barbara:
He already did things for them that no Republican was ever able to do, the only things the so-called distressed white working class voters really care about: He beat a Clinton in an election, he insulted and mocked that [insert sexist epithet] in public and was rewarded for it, and he repudiated that [insert racist epithet] and will now erase his every achievement.
He will be their hero forever. Keep in mind if the economy crashes they will blame Obama, the press/media will agree, and everyone will believe it.
Emma
@My Truth Hurts: We are so sorry that we did not worship at the feet of your purity god. The Jewish communist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, refused to release his income taxes, dismissed all the concerns of people other than white males until his feet were held to the fire, and had a wife with her shady real estate deals that crashed a whole college. Yeah, sure.
Daulnay
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Nobody would be so stupid. There are no petrochemicals under Yellowstone, it’s a magma dome. That’s why there are all the geysers.
Kay
Another hard Right loony-tune joins Team Trump:
Kobach is multi-talented. He’s also one of the Right’s most revered voter suppression specialists.
Phylllis
@Jeffro: Most of them probably voted for Trump as well. I can assure you the majority of folks who work in my district did.
Betty Cracker
@John:
LOL! Literally! Thanks. I needed that.
@MisterForkbeard: Very nice. Thank you!
Cermet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe – but last I checked, smart people read all available points of view and carefully weigh them. His points made a lot of sense and should have raised some alarm. Yes, even a broken clock gets the time right twice (or if military, once) a day. Upwards of a $billion were spent on her bid – think they should have realized that PA was going thug! And a thug Governor was elected in WI – why didn’t that set off alarms!? Please, experts are paid so one isn’t blind sided – lose PA, MI and WI!!? Maybe miss one but all three! That is fucked up.
Citizen_X
@MisterForkbeard:
Yeah, but that lesson didn’t exactly stick, now did it?
MisterForkbeard
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): We got this.
It’s hard to remember right now, but our people rise to the occasion. We have some really great up-and-comers out there, like Tammy Duckworth and Kamala Harris. There’s some people I’ve lost some respect for but are still pretty awesome, like Tulsi Gabbard. There are others who gave speeches this year at the DNC that were fantastic and inspiring, though no one really hit the height’s of Obama’s 2004 keynote.
We have a lot of smart, capable people that just need a chance to get out there and inspire. And with Trump in charge, there’s going to be no shortage or chances to show that we’re willing to get out there and do the right thing. In 2 years, we’ll have a lot of new names. In 4, we’ll have more than enough.
Captain C
@Redshift:
cf. Davis X. Machina’s observation about the salient fact of American politics.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@Corner Stone: What can be defunded can be refunded in the future.
But this…
I thought they’ve been drilling and fraking like nuts.See John’s car in a farm field thanks to that. The only thing holding it back is because they we’ve been drilling and franking like nuts is the price dropped. And as far as coal goes isn’t it dying because of the switch over to natural gas? I am beging to suspect Trump’s real game is to just take anything Obama did, say it was awful, then slap the name Trump on it and call it awesome.
gene108
@Jeffro:
But those stories were not repeated ad nauseum on CNN and other media outlets, unlike e-mails. You’d have to actually go to the WaPo or Newsweek websites and read a lot of words. They weren’t broken down into soundbites the way Benghazi and e-mails were.
The level of damage that has to be done to this country, before there is broad based condemnation will have to be worse than Bush, Jr.
For a lot of voters, if the choice is between a corrupt as hell Trump or a faggot-loving-tree-hugging-Mexican-loving-tofu-eating Democrat, they’ll happily choose Trump.
I don’t think a lot of people think America stands for anything anymore, so they will vote for what they feel is the lowest common denominator that makes them identify with a politician.
Peale
@Kay: Yep. I’m pretty sure that we’re repealing pretty much all immigration law back to 1965, except for the part where prior to 1965 there were no caps on immigration from the western hemisphere. Also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the number of staff responsible for reviewing applications and approving citizenship will be reduced to 2.
kdaug
It’s all upside.
Gindy51
The thing about digging up all the fossil fuel is plain nuts. Fracking hyperventilated the ND economy and once energy prices dove it crashed big time. There isn’t enough storage space to keep pumping oil, the leases expired on almost all the Arctic oil exploration months ago and no on wanted them, too expensive to drill baby drill for what you could sell it for. A very dumb plan all around.
chopper
@debit:
yeah, i assume putin is frantically texting him right now.
Corner Stone
Trump has such horrible posture. He collapses his shoulders in on themselves and hunches forward. Giving him a tired, disinterested demeanor. Which I am sure is accurate but fer dog’s sake man.
Lizzy L
A friend of mine posted on his FB page this morning that someone — not someone he knows personally, but a friend of a friend — has committed suicide out of fear of losing health care. I cannot, of course, verify this event. But my friend is a truthful and compassionate man, and stressed-out, terrified people do extreme things.
This is very hard. Damn it. Someone brought up 9/11 — I am feeling some of the same trauma.
liberal
It’s going to be pretty hard to do all this oil exploration at current prices.
MisterForkbeard
@Iowa Old Lady: @debit: I’m so happy for Walter. That’s fantastic that you’ve got each other right now.
@Citizen_X: It DID, actually. Hillary won the popular vote, despite the efforts of the FBI, the Russians, and the media. Due to our system it still means Trump won the office, but more people voted for us than them. Moral victories aren’t exactly great, but we got one. And it only takes ONE event like this for people to realize how important their own vote is. Turnout’s our key, now and in the future.
debit
@liberal: You just don’t understand the genius that is Trump. You’re going to get so sick of winning, I can’t even tell you.
sgt.schmaltz
Funny, I was just asking a friend yesterday which stage of Kubler-Ross was the INCENDIARY FUCKING HATRED stage.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Anger today, anger tomorrow, anger forever.
Redshift
@MisterForkbeard: Unfortunately, a big less of all of this is that the Clinton Rules work. I heard otherwise reasonable people parroting “if I had done what she did, I’d be in jail” about the emails. It’s complete bullshit, but using government power to hold months of hearings about Hillary last summer/fall was the ultimate in “defining your opponent.” A couple of months ago, I heard a journalist talking about how The Clintons(tm) don’t do anything illegal, but “always skate close to the edge.” That’s complete bullshit, true, but everyone in the Village “knows” it’s true.
So one of the things we’ll see a lot of in the coming years is the same kind of “investigations” of any Democrat who seems to be up and coming. There won’t be anything solid behind it, but “where there’s smoke” will rule. We’re living in post-truth politics.
liberal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Apparently you’ve never heard the phrase “argumentum ad hominem”.
Peale
@MisterForkbeard: I don’t really want to vote for another senator again…but…I’m pretty sure that the Filibuster is gone and we’ll be getting lots of heinous legislation that will make our heads spin. Being cut out of the debate has its drawbacks, but at least the GOP can go it alone and we won’t have all of these politicians trying to run against heinous decisions that they themselves voted for. I know, it probably doesn’t help to run on “we prevented nothing.”
Mister Papercut
@MisterForkbeard:
I dunno, on my end from what I’ve seen it’s about 50/50 between turning on President-elect Shit-Monster-from-“Dogma” and hitting Usain Bolt levels of speed to strap on their kneepads and knob-slurping bibs.
Barbara
@Redshift: Actually, they probably are — just — smart enough to realize that to abolish the EPA is to cede control of a lot of environmental regulation to the state of California. With no federal regulation there is almost no way to preempt states and big states like New York and California can drive what businesses are required to do. It was industry that finally asked the federal government to please promulgate efficiency standards for refrigerators and other appliances because they were getting hit with conflicting standards from different states.
catclub
@Lizzy L:
In the terrorist event on Nov 8, 2016, the terrorists were already inside the house, not voting.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Lizzy L: People have checked into institutions. One man tweeted that several trans youth committed suicide. Even if Trump got abducted by aliens tomorrow the fact that he got elected shatters the soul. The hate has been unleashed.
Emerald
@MomSense: Al Giordano is preparing to give us the guidelines for what to do. He agrees and says it absolutely must be non-violent, and don’t let anyone deviate from that. It’s the only thing that works.
He did give us one pointer, which he says is the first thing he was taught: “The first duty of a revolutionary is: don’t get caught.”
Also Sarah Kendzior is going to be tweeting out advice. She says don’t do anything in the Acela lanes—use the Greyhound bus lanes and stay underground.
Sarah has studied authoritarian regimes and Al has lived in them. Follow them both on Twitter and subscribe to Al’s newsletter (he’s nice about that—he gave me a subscription for $5 because I was broke. I send him more when I can).
I suspect we’re safe on BJ for awhile, and that John will be able to destroy our personal information when the time comes. But we’re going to have to watch our backs, because there’s a real chance that eventually they will come for us. (No, I don’t think that’s being melodramatic.)
Daulnay
@MisterForkbeard:
That’s right. Let’s embrace everyone who can will join us, even if we don’t agree with some of what they believe, or are working class whites, or are painfully naive. And listen to them, please. Part of Trump’s win came because he listened to part of the polity that felt ignored by both political establishments — he convincingly pretended to. He is a consummate and successful con artist after all. The other part, of course, was the usual Republican fearmongering, voter supression, and media, but that has to be factored in for any Republican.
amygdala
@MisterForkbeard: Congratulations! And welcome, Joy Forkbeard.
MisterForkbeard
@MomSense: Yep. They’re going to do an incredible amount of damage. But like that time when my mother forgot to use the parking break and the pickup trick rolled downhill into the side of the house, it’s repairable.
The important thing is, you can keep the worst things from happening with hard work and dedication. We pulled the truck out, patched up the wall with a big temp patch, and called in the electrician. We didn’t have the money to really fix everything the right way immediately, so that wall and room were a big problem for a few years. But it got better and better, and now the only real history of that damage is the stories we tell about my mom and a bunch of old bills. We spent money fixing the damage that we could have used for other things, but that’s how life works.
In case it wasn’t clear, Trump is the truck. And we junked that fucker. We’ll do the same to Trump.
gene108
@Cermet:
Barack Obama saved the motherfucking U.S. auto industry. Millions of jobs in Ohio and Michigan still exist because of Barack Obama.
They did not notice because he’s too blackity-blackity-black.
Hillary Clinton was talking about ending corporate inversions, slapping penalties on companies shipping jobs overseas, etc., but none of that registered. Yet all people heard about was probably Goldman Sachs speeches, e-mails and Benghazi.
I’m sorry, but I really want to know what-the-fuck else do Democrats have to do get people’s attention that they are trying to help them economically?
liberal
@debit: I just told my wife a few minutes ago that this is going to be like a slow motion car crash, the kind you really want to rubberneck, though it’s going to last years.
I know, it’s tragic, and really terrible for some people, but gotta have some humor in order to preserve sanity.
Hopefully Yaweh will strike down Trump, Pence, and all the Republicans. (Dad told me decades ago, “A good Republican is a dead Republican.”)
liberal
@gene108:
Maybe. But it could also be because they’re fuckin’ stupid.
liberal
@Daulnay:
I think he kind of got lucky. He had his shtick, and it turned out to resonate. That doesn’t make him a great listener.
Hitless
@James E Powell: It is true that there is no comfort in it for her or anyone else. But it important to remember and to try to make people remember because:
1) It can help de-legitimize republican control of government in the perception of those that are persuadable
2) It should remind us all that this nation is not monolithically made up of people that support the republican agenda
Cermet
@MisterForkbeard: Al Gore was cheated but Hillary lost PA, and WI by large numbers – the rules are the rules and it, unlike 2000, was above board and fair. I will not complain about that issue – why Hillary and her team didn’t know they would lose that large in those two states is beyond unbelievable! Unlike MI or NH where both were razor thin – PA, especially was not acceptable. PA!!! Even I heard it might be trouble and I’m not anything but a fellow BJ’er reading local/national news. I will give her credit that she did put some extra effort there but not enough it seems. Well, the past is that and we need to move forward – clean out the Clinton peoples (they did their job but are history) and obstuct and obstruct and let the rubes have their social services cut. Then local dems will get traction and maybe win some local seats back.
Daulnay
@Emerald:
I agree. For the first time in my life I feel unsafe in my middle-class enclave. Some of Trump’s inner circle are true anti-Semite Stormfront-style scum (Bannon). We are planning in case we have to flee.
(((Daulnay)))
Hoodie
Because all great economies are based on non-replaceable resource extraction. This sells with the moron caucus because they think that driving through the Cookout window pickup line in a gigantic truck depicted in TV adds towing a bulldozer or hauling boulders is the same thing as doing actual work.
liberal
@Emma: Laugh all you want, but the fact is Hillary lost, and someone else might not have.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Trumpledforeskin can plan anything he wants. Obama planned to close Gitmo. Didn’t happen (but should have).
Trump will not get his every angry wish.
Phylllis
@Lizzy L: It dawned on me driving home from work today that I now understand the feelings of those folks who committed murder/suicide when President Obama was elected.
Bostondreams
@Phylllis:
A teacher friend here in Florida, a #NeverTrump Republican who teaches social studies, was relaying on Facebook that he had to calm some of his students and help them find ways to address their fears. Another teacher at a district school told him he was going to tell the district this teacher was violating district policy and pacing. My teacher friend told the ahole that the district would be fine with making sure their classroom was an environment dedicated to learning.
Lots of teachers in this state are horrible.
liberal
@Daulnay: I understand where you’re coming from…any conversation with my dad gets to the Holocaust within 30 minutes…but if things get that bad for American Jews, it will have already erupted into full-scale civil war.
PJ
@gene108: Well, actually Barack Obama won in Ohio and Michigan. I have my doubts that his supporters who didn’t vote for Hillary suddenly decided that, as racists who had voted for the black guy, twice, they weren’t going to vote for a white woman.
Raven Onthill
@Major Major Major Major: “I feel bad for Hllary”
Trump’s going to jail her if he can, and I think he can.
BTW, has anyone else yet linked Charles Pierce’s summary of Trump’s early likely cabinet appointees? Yeek!
Mnemosyne
@My Truth Hurts:
Explain how the Jewish Socialist beats the anti-Semitic white supremacist.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Shell:
Yes, there was a notice a week or so ago. Submissions due by November 18. Sorry I can’t look it up for you on the phone. Actually, I suppose I could, but I’m just too apathetic to do it right now.
. . . Okay, I looked it up. Info here.
Kay
@Peale:
Kobach is a real nutcase. Mitt Romney had to lie and say Kobach wasn’t advising him when it came out he was advising him in ’12.
Immigration will be restricted to white people only. Perhaps only Melania’s family members?
chopper
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
obviously.
liberal
@Emerald:
I don’t think that’s true. “To everything there is a season,” including resisting with violence. The point is that it’s almost always counterproductive, so you damn well better have thought out your justification first.
goblue72
I see that Betty and most of the rest of the clueless BJ front page crew are unsurprisingly defaulting to the “its not our fault we lost, its their fault they won” argument. Because it requires absolutely zero self-reflection, avoids all blame for failure, and reinforces the preconceived biases of liberals. How convenient, as the Church Lady would say.
Meanwhile, professional analysts are rightfully nailing the Democratic Party to the wall for ignoring what has been increasingly obvious over the last several election cycles. (And I’m not talking about the talking head pundits on TV.) Namely, that parties are about the assembly of voter coalitions cobbled together from various voter sub-groups. That is the prime function of a political party. To assemble voter groups, and to win. If you lose repeatedly like the Dems have time and time again at the Federal and state level, then you are doing it wrong. Doubling down on more of the same is lunacy.
Those voter coalitions are not set in stone. They can be modified. Not tossed out wholesale, but modified. The Democratic Party has pursued a strategy based around younger voters, minority voters, and a rump of union households that is now mainly composed of teachers & public sector employees. The latter gets smaller and smaller every year as unionization shrinks outside of teachers and the public sector. Younger voters don’t turn out except under certain narrow conditions. Minority voters turn out (relatively) in Presidential elections, and then don’t during mid-terms. Its an unstable voting coalition and not one that is working for SUSTAINED and CONSISTENT success at the ballot box. We lost the Midwest and without the Midwest we are DONE. Fantasies about the Latino vote in Arizona or Texas are just nonsense.
Success at the ballot box allows you to control the lever of legislative power at the state level (and Federal). Which allows you to rig the system in your favor. If you aren’t rigging the system, you are doing it wrong. GOP rigs to suppress minority voters. We rig it to enhance minority voters (such as through automatic voter registration, elimination of ID requirements, automatic vote by mail, etc). They rig it to gerrymander for them. We rig it to gerrymander for us. Etc. Each turn of the election cycle we win, more opportunities to rig it.
Our voter coalition needs to change. We are not adding to it. We keep bleeding from it. That we lost the Midwest like we did is embarrassing. Not because we lost it this cycle. But because the fact that we had lost most of the governor’s offices in the Midwest and so many state legislatures and so many Congressional seats in the Midwest for many prior election cycles should have been a clue. A clue in 10 foot tall neon letters. You cannot lose at the state and district level that badly, and that consistently, without it bleeding all the way up eventually and biting you in the ass.
I brought this up here months ago and was branded as racist for even suggesting it by the chattering fools around here. Guess what? You lost. Horrifically so. White House – GONE. SCOTUS – GONE. Senate – took back one seat. House – gained a mere seven. Go us! State governors – Dems lost THREE more. GOP now controls 34 out of 50 governors. (And newsflash, you can’t gerrymander a state, so you can’t blame it on that) And more state legislative chambers fell to the GOP. And in 2018, the Senate prospects get WORSE. The “we have nowhere to go but up” theory doesn’t really work like that.
So, Obamacare – gone. The Ryan tax plan will get passed and kill poor people and the middle class as the GOP eviscerates the safety net. Climate change – going to get way worse. And on and on.
But please, tell me how this is totally explained away by Betty’s “white people suck Nixon shitgibbon gabba gabba gabba” nonsense. Every cycle we lose, there’s some lame-ass excuse about how it the other side’s fault and all we need to do is double down. The scoreboard says you have no clue.
Emma
@liberal: I love the “if” implied in that sentence. And if I were 40 years younger and a hundred pounds lighter I could make a play for Prince Harry. Bernie had as much chance of succeeding as a snowflake in Hell. So would any third party candidate.
MisterForkbeard
@Cermet: Oh, this election WAS fair, if totally off-base in how many of our institutions treated the Hillary campaign. No argument there – Trump won.
What I was getting at is that Hillary still got a majority of votes in the country. We’re still ‘net’ good. We just need to get everybody out, and get someone out front that will be slightly harder to sandbag next time. It’s all doable.
Poopyman
@Emerald:
A word on that. Do this even if you have no intent on any action. A cloud of followers helps obscure those that may need it.
Kay
I think education will be Ben Carson. He wants everyone home-schooled so they’ll save a ton of money there for tax cuts for Trump.
Major Major Major Major
@goblue72: What’s your proposed new coalition?
celticdragonchick
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Phreatic eruptions are nothing if not entertaining.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Name the someone else. Obama was already on Dems’ radar for four (4) years before he started running for president.
And, no, Bernie Sanders the Jewish Socialist does no better against Trump’s white supremacist propaganda machine than Hillary does.
Cermet
@PJ: Still, sexism is still very strong in this country; yes, I do believe that played a role – not as big as the media trumping all the thugs lies, but it most certainly did matter.
gene108
@Daulnay:
Trump did blow a hole in the whole Republican talking points of why people like them, such as free trade, privatizing Social Security, etc., but it’ll be interesting to see how these same voters react, when nothing changes or things get worse.
I think a lot of them will still stick with Trump.
I think a lot of people didn’t care that Trump made outlandish promises. He has a pen$s, unlike his opponent, so he’ll find a manly way to get things done, even if it’s different than this campaign.
Emma
@goblue72: And I am tired of people like you telling me that it’s my fault for not being liberal enough and willing to accept the judgment of white males and take second place. I am tired of being blamed for the racism, and sheer misogyny of American white men. If you’re the future of the Democratic party I’ll see you in Cardiff when you come visit.
Daulnay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Both of those are true. Some of the people who voted for Trump were basically decent people who were in a lot of economic pain. Those people were never listened to by liberals except for the Michael Moores, who were summarily ignored. But part of the Trump bloc are evil people who would happily gas anyone who isn’t like them. The Nazis feel emboldened, and will make all the people in the first category sick at heart over how they voted. If we want to stop Trump, we need to help them get to that point and lumping them with the Trumpen SS will hinder that trajectory.
Betsy
@Major Major Major Major: umm … are you the commenter who was producing most common or most typical phrases used by various commenters?
Cermet
@Mnemosyne: One word: O’Malley
Barbara
@Cermet: I do read The Nation, which I find mostly useful. I think one person made an accurate comment that Clinton’s messaging of building bridges instead of walls was probably too much of a cultural response and not enough of an economic message that could resonate across all racial groups. She never took Trump on when it came to trade. NAFTA and WTO are real and I think it was totally predictable at least at the beginning of the year that she needed to take those things on head on. The things she chose to take on, like the Alt Right, were also culturally focused. I am glad she did, it certainly spoke to me, but she didn’t need to speak to me.
liberal
@Hitless: Yeah, why not push it?
Just like people should never use the phrase “Chief Justice Roberts” but rather “Chief Justice and noted racist Roberts”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@liberal: Oh wow, Latin! Very impressive!
@liberal: , “someone else” might well have. Bernie Sanders would not.
Kay
Have any of the reasonable centrists suggested Trump appoint a Democrat? They were all advising Clinton to appoint Republicans.
More special treatment for the Trump Team.
chopper
@catclub:
isn’t it funny? the last two gooper presidents lost the popular vote but got in with the electoral college.
Corner Stone
Hey, guys. I have a pretty constructive idea for rebuilding the future and maybe doing some connecting with the other side. I heard about an office being used by Republicans in NC that was vandalized and had fire damage. I think it would be a great show of reaching across the aisle and being the better person if we took up a collection for them to rebuild. Something like $10,000 or so, waddya think?
Cermet
@goblue72: Falling on mostly deaf ears here – you are 110% correct.
John
@gene108: Honestly? She would have probably won if she had walked up to Trump after he called her “Nasty woman” at the debate and slapped him across the face. Would have been all anyone talked about and it’s the kind of thing that Trump’s mouthbreather voters would respond to. Not that they would have voted for Hillary, but they would have lost a lot of their enthusiasm for America’s Worst President.
Mike J
Extubated and dangled.
Captain C
@gene108:
Take stuff away from people they don’t like?
Corner Stone
@Kay:
For the sake of uniting the country, healing the division, Donald Trump should really consider appointing a Democrat to a Cabinet position.
/said no pundit ever
catclub
@chopper: hi-larious
Captain C
@liberal: I’m going with both.
Phylllis
@Bostondreams: There are indeed, many assholes in teaching. If we could just get rid of the ones who openly and actively dislike kids, that would be a starter. And there are a lot of them.
MisterForkbeard
@Cermet: I think O’Malley didn’t really have a good path forward, and he was fairly uninspiring when given the chance. I DO think he’s decently up in the list for the next round, especially if he spends the next few years raising his profile.
Mnemosyne
One wishes that some liberal white men would have learned by now that if women and people of color and LGBTQ all unite to tell you that something is a problem, it’s a motherfucking problem and you should at least attempt to comprehend what they’re trying to tell you rather than dismissing it out of hand.
Sigh.
PJ
@Cermet: I don’t doubt that sexism played a significant role in depressing the Democratic vote for Hillary, but I am skeptical that racism against Hillary, or Obama, for that matter, did in 2016. Of course, bigotry against minorities of all sorts played a big part in Trump’s campaign, but I doubt that most of the people motivated by that message would ever have voted for a Democrat.
Kay
Get used to it. He told the press to fuck off during his campaign and no one stood up to him. They thought he would be MORE transparent as President and Supreme Ruler?
Fat chance. The only thing we’ll know about that administration is whatever bullshit they make up.
Patricia Kayden
@Major Major Major Major: I cried for Secretary Clinton on Tuesday night. She is not a bad person and doesn’t deserve the derision and harassment that she has been subjected to on the left and on the right. And most importantly, she would have made an excellent President. The same thing cannot be said about Trump who is nothing but a bigot.
Felonius Monk
@My Truth Hurts: I see you didn’t take my advice given in an earlier thread, so go FUCK YOURSELF.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: This is going to be a learning experience for a lot of people in the media.
For once, they’re actually the target.
PJ
@Mnemosyne: Biden, most obviously.
Cacti
@PJ:
Trump premised economic revival in part on the oppression of minorities.
What’s the word to describe that again? Oh yeah, fascism.
Trump ran on a fascist message and won.
catclub
@Kay: New Orleans stations mention Bobby Jindal as HHS possibility. That might be Jindal tooting his own horn,
for all I know. He is roundly hated by Democrats and Republicans alike in Louisiana. He broke budgets as badly or worse than Brownback.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
I just want to say that someone should be collecting all of Kay’s comments and tweeting them all over the goddamn place. They are succinct, right on target, and funny.
Emma
@Mnemosyne: I am beginning to think that the rest of us should find extra-political (ugh, not the right word) to network and help each other. Let them spend their time trying to win back the “white working class” — it’ll keep them busy while we do something about the problem.
Cermet
@Emma: Uh, I read his/her post and didn’t read any of that into it? Maybe I missed it so do correct me. However, his points are correct – look at what the thugs DID control well before this election in those states – those were huge red flags. What the dems miss (or we missed if we consider ourselves part of the under management -lol) was such fucking obvious warning flags. Please, that matters and MUST be first understood. How to fix it is what the party has supposedly paid big bucks to have done so Hillary won those states! They fucking didn’t!!!
Barbara
@Redshift: Yes. As a cultural phenomenon, these people remind me of my brother (who never votes). He lost his house a few years ago when his girlfriend broke up with him. For a variety of reasons, his name was not on the title. It was not very valuable, but he had done a lot of work on it and he lost it and his girlfriend in one fell swoop. Six years later, my mother just keeps saying, he can’t get over it. There’s another house out there, there’s another girl out there, but that would require moving on, using imagination and letting go of the things he thought he had. And, of course, it’s everyone else’s fault that the bad stuff happened.
Kay
Hah! I didn’t think the Trump Family would go through with running the business out of the White House but they plan on it.
I hope Trump does those commercials for the hotels he did during the campaign as President.
Banana republic, here we come. The bar of acceptable Presidential behavior is going to get VERY low. It’s crashing as we speak.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MisterForkbeard: my first exposure to O’Malley, and I didn’t know who he was, was as the 2012 Obama surrogate who was left stammering when Bob Schieffer asked him, in a leading, scolding, Ward Cleaver tone, if he could really argue that the country was better off after four years of the Obama presidency. Nothing I saw from then on made him seem more impressive. On paper he should’ve been the ideal candidate of the d-Kos types, and apparently they couldn’t even get excited about him. And his Lite Guv lost to a Republican in a very blue state, and a lot of people (I honestly don’t know) blame that on O’Malley.
ETA:
Quite possible.
Cacti
@Kay:
Hah hah MFers.
After 8-years of carping about Obama not holding your hands, you’ve earned every bit of it.
Felonius Monk
@goblue72: Ah, but Bernie would have saved us, amirite?
Kathleen
@Amanda in the South Bay: Mine involves consuming 2 pints of ice cream in the past 2 days. Sort of like a character in a dystopian rom-com.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I find it pretty amazing that Trump ran a campaign specifically devoted to scapegoating the media, and the media essentially laughed it off. “That rapscallion, inciting violence against us! He is the living end!”
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
We lost the Midwest because MINORITY VOTERS WERE PREVENTED FROM VOTING.
Jesus fucking Christ. There are MULTIPLE stories in the media about how minority voters in MI, WI, OH, and PA were NOT ALLOWED TO VOTE because of the Voter ID laws that were SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO PREVENT THEM FROM VOTING.
And you’re fine with that. You don’t give a shit that DEMOCRATIC MINORITY VOTERS WERE TURNED AWAY AT THE POLLS. Instead, we need to find new voters to replace the ones who were NOT PERMITTED TO VOTE.
I can already hear you in 1964: Well, if all these negroes aren’t being allowed to vote, we’ll just have to find white voters who agree with us instead!
Emma
@Cermet: So, no voter suppression? (yes, maybe they could have done more there but the freaking courts threw the cases out). What else? Beg pretty please the idiots who voted for third party candidates or WROTE IN THE NAME OF A DEAD GORILLA so they could keep their snowflake purity intact? Tell the racists that really, those people in our party, we’ll ignore them when we get there? WHAT?
Patricia Kayden
When will the media demand that Trump condemn his racist supporters? Trump’s election has the White Supremacists crawling out of the woodwork. This will not end well.
gene108
@goblue72:
If you are rigging the system you are doing it wrong in a strong, stable democracy. Dictatorships rig the system, so they can win and win, even if the people hate what they are doing.
By suppressing the vote to only your supporters you are basically rigging the system like a dictatorship.
By “rigging” the system, so more people can vote you are opening the system up to everyone, even those, who will vote against you.
It’s not the same.
What is your plan?
Hoodie
@John: You might have a point. The appeal of Trump as “politically incorrect” is that he would do something like that. Hillary kept talking about how she would never stop fighting for people, but she really didn’t give them concrete proof she’d do it. The prevailing mythology about Clinton “triangulation” didn’t help in that regard. Socking Trump in the kisser might have made the point, particularly to women who ended up voting for Trump. Trump succeeded by messaging that he would defy sensibilities to serve his base. Of course, it was largely stagecraft, but I think his base really knows that. They just wanted him to make a fool of himself for them.
Kathleen
@John: Hitler’s Hologram maybe?
Mnemosyne
@Cermet:
O’Malley ran this year. Remember? He got no traction and faded away very fast.
mai naem mobile
The traditional photo op incoming/outgoing pic of president and flotus has been canceled. I sincerely hope it’s Obama who cancelled it and not Camacho being that he will get blamed anyway.
goblue72
@Emma: This isn’t about your fee-fees anymore than its about mine. This is politics not church. The goal is to win. You get to be right, after you win.
And yes, that means we have to figure out how to win back white voters, both women and men. Clinton didn’t just lose white male voters. She lost white women too. “Figuring out how to appeal to white voters” does NOT mean having to run a racist or misogynist party. But it does mean figuring out how to appeal to those voters and spending a LOT more time figuring THAT out. Because they show up. Every. Fucking. Election.
The fact that you immediately jump to that kind of hyperbole tells me exactly how far up your rear end that your head is.
Renie
So I’m home from work after not being able to concentrate all day and still feel sick to my stomach. I could have accepted any other republican, even cruz, but trump is such a vile human being. Right behind him is that awful guiliani. I hope Pres Obama does whatever he can to make sure they don’t prosecute Hillary cuz I’m positive guiliani has a hard-on for it.
I’ve read all the posts here and glad some people feel positive enough to continue the fight, but I see my retirement plans going down the toilet cuz I know this a$$hole will collapse the economy or, worse, cut social security and raise the age for medicare. Luckily I have two kids who I have passed the baton on to cuz they are enraged at what has happen.
I’m so grateful I’m a white person who lives in a blue state but its going to get bad for minorities and muslims in this country in the new fascist American. I work with someone who grew up in the Soviet Union who kept telling me it’s not that bad. I told him its all relative. I always believed I lived in a democracy and now I feel its gone.
Cermet
@MisterForkbeard: He wasn’t the best candidate, for sure (lol.) But if he had been nominated, I would wager a lot he’d have won because he had little baggage but miost of all, the “No insider” wave works for him!. He was starting to get the hang of it in the second debate and if he could have held on, maybe gotten rather good (but still, really had no chance against Hillary and the embedded advantage of assigned delegates.)
sukabi
14 things that the msm isn’t talking about.
Kathleen
@Elizabelle: I don’t think it was all about ratings and revenue. I think it was part of the plan to install Trump.
Renie
my comment got stuck in moderation? is this cuz of trump? please release me
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
I guess we are gonna do the “what ifs” for fucking ever.
Patricia Kayden
@goblue72: So how exactly should the Democratic Party reach out to racist White voters who are okay with Trump’s lack of qualifications and bigotry? More Americans voted for Secretary Clinton than voted for Trump.
And also tell me exactly what Trump is going to do to help these White racists who think he’s going to bring back their jobs from China and build a wall to keep out the Brown people. Plus, you need to address the role that voter suppression played in the past election.
Mnemosyne
@MisterForkbeard:
It was not fair. Minority voters were systematically targeted and prevented from voting. It was legal, but it was not in the least fair.
Also, congrats on the little one. May her poops be easily cleaned. ;-)
Cacti
@goblue72:
Clinton actually improved on Obama’s margin with white women voters.
You’re talking as if she lost a group that wasn’t already voting R.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Dwight’s plan is to be an obnoxious asshole on a political blog and call it “grassroots activism”. I do believe the poor little feller has even described himself as a “revolutionary”.
Felonius Monk
@Cermet:
Oh, you Jester.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
This X1000
Emma
@goblue72: Let me explain it clearly and I think I speak for every freaking democratic woman in the country: If you’re idea of winning back white voters is to “delay” any protection for my Constitutional rights or those of POCs or LGBT people you are going to find that the Democratic party will be left behind so fast God’s head will spin.
sukabi
@mai naem mobile: drumpf refuses to have a press pool traveling with him, this is on him.
Cermet
@PJ: I agree – I said it played a role, not pivotal but did to a good extent, for sure. But for woman it is/was/will be a factor – look how many double standards she had to overcome because of being a woman.
chopper
@Enhanced Voting Techinques:
for the most part, yeah, coal is getting killed by natural gas. then again, we’ve already dug up all of the really good coal and are most of the way through the secondary stuff. we’re relying more and more on the tertiary stuff which is shit. costs more to process, full of water, sulfur, hydrogen and metals. still a cheap form of electricity if you ignore the environmental effects, but not anywhere near as cheap as natural gas.
gene108
@MisterForkbeard:
They’ll do what Trump tells them to do.
Many in the national press corp are sniveling back stabbing careerists, who do not give a damn about anything beyond a big fat paycheck.
I think it will be really interesting how the media treats the Trump rape case, when it goes to trial, since they have mostly ignored it.
Paula Jones was covered extensively.
Will they devote the same bandwidth the possible rape of the 13 year old girl?
I somehow doubt it.
WaterGirl
Still sick to my stomach with a feeling of impending doom, wondering how the impossible can be happening and thinking surely there is something we can do to stop it and then realizing that no, there really isn’t. This scumbag will be the president. Fuck.
Just a minute ago it occurred to me that his head of FEMA will surely be as incompetent as all the other right wing unqualified idiots he will select. What great timing to have in incompetent at FEMA when we will surely be having more and more big storm events because of climate change. More bloated bodies floating in the waters after the floods.
So I will ask again. How is it possible that there’s nothing we can do to stop this train that is so clearly headed for disaster?
Felonius Monk
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
ROFLMAO, dude.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder, in idle moments, if that case will be used as an excuse to impeach Trump if it’s decided that he is no longer worth the bother.
Cermet
@PJ: The wave of anti-insider kinda makes him look just as bad as Hillary; also, Biden was close to banks/wall street but he was a male … .
SenyorDave
@gene108: I think it will be really interesting how the media treats the Trump rape case, when it goes to trial, since they have mostly ignored it.
My understanding is that the rape case has been dropped, am I incorrect?
Phylllis
@Kay: It will be a nation of charter schools and private schools. I see federal education funds ending up block-granted to state governors, who will in turn use them to fund schools such as Andrew Jackson Academy and Jesus is Lord Christian School (two actual private schools in guess where? South Carolina).
Major Major Major Major
@Betsy: Ahh! Yes, that’s me. I don’t have your information handy unfortunately, I’d have to re-run everything. Looks like you didn’t make the cut-off, I only stored the info for the top 300 or so most-frequent commenters. Sorry :(
Felonius Monk
@gene108:
Don’t think so. Story is they paid off and it went away.
Daulnay
@Emma:
We have to accept that racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry exist. That’s not your fault, and it’s not your fault for hoping for better. But even when we have our heads in the clouds, we have to keep our feet on the ground. And that’s what the poster was trying to say — the signs were all there, if you were willing to look for them. Get your feet back on the ground and put together a coalition that will win. But here, people who pointed those signs out were attacked for spreading Republican memes, or being Republican ratfuckers. I went back to being a lurker after the first couple times that happened to me, and I’m way more leftwing than 90% of the posters here.
Nobody’s asking you to follow the lead of white men. Winning requires a coalition, though, so we sometimes have to embrace people who we wouldn’t want to have dinner with often, and treat them with ordinary respect. We have to factor in some sexism, racism, and religious bigotry, it’s only gradually going to go away; pick a candidate who will win anyway. Obama did win, after all.
WarMunchkin
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
And we’re sentenced to relitigating the primary.
PJ
@Patricia Kayden: Whoever the Democrats run has to get more people out to vote in contested areas. Obama did it twice, Hillary did not. Slightly less than half of all eligible Americans did not vote in this election. You have to motivate enough of those people to come out. I think Obama could have done it again, I think Biden could have done it.
Cermet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Term limit (he won twice) – he didn’t lose to anyone; also, I saw him cut to pieces a fox reporter on their show defending Hillary extremely well – as I said, he was learning quickly and getting up to speed.
Mnemosyne
@PJ:
Biden had all of the same NAFTA/Wall Street problems that Hillary had. He was the Senator from MBNA. Every negative that Hillary had, Biden had, but worse.
And yet he might have done better, because he’s a white man. That peni$ covers a lot of the sins that the Berniebros claimed to be Oh So Upset about in Clinton.
James E Powell
@goblue72:
So, who do we want to add? The sub- and ex-urban homeowners who define themselves by their distance & difference from the people who compose the Democratic base? Religious anti-abortion people who will never – NEVER – vote for a pro-choice candidate? It’s very common after a loss to claim that the Democrats Didn’t. Even. Try. to get [insert flavor of the cycle] voters, but the truth is that there are large blocs of voters who are not gettable. Do you ever see Republicans after a loss writing about how they need to try to attract Democratic voters who will never – NEVER – vote for an anti-choice candidate?
What the party needs to do is build the local and state organizations. Give them the money and training to go house to house in the zip codes where Democrats do well. Make sure you got everyone registered. Hold social events to build community. Stop pretending like people of color are not the Real Democratic Base.
Peale
@PJ: Yeah. I’m not seeing it. Once his Iraq War vote and Bankruptcy bill vote come out, he looks a lot like another of those lousy centerist corporate Democrats who made compromises back in the 1990s and Bush Administration that everyone really hates now.
PJ
@Cermet: But he doesn’t have anywhere near the negatives/baggage of Hillary, plus he is a much better retail politician.
Scamp Dog
@Lizzy L: For me, my take on 9/11 as it was happening was that, “they’ve hit us hard enough to make us mad, but not hard enough to our ability to take them down.” More pissed off than traumatized (I get why it was really bad for lots of people, there was plenty of real trauma to go around, it’s just that it didn’t hit me or mine directly). But then we lost our shit, decided that civil liberties were no big thing to sacrifice in the name of safety, and instead of sticking to the main task and wrapping things up in Afghanistan, decided to go into Iraq as well.
This is time around I do feel traumatized. I’ll be losing my health insurance in the fall, and having to pay the full, unsubsidized price for a policy that won’t cover anything that’s a pre-existing condition will wreck my finances. So I will leave teaching (probably a good idea though, I’m an adjunct) and go back to the “defense” business. Not that the weapon systems that I’ll work on will do any good, but they do make us feel strong and powerful, I guess. Plus knowing that a fair fraction of my co-workers will be Trumpistas. Blech.
joel hanes
@Kay:
Kobach is multi-talented. He’s also one of the Right’s most revered voter suppression specialists.
and a hard-core Christo-fascist, including complete opposition to abortion under any circumstances, and I’m sure he’s no fan of Griswold (contraception, right to privacy) either.
Kathleen
@MisterForkbeard: Thank you! And welcome, Baby Joy!
MisterForkbeard
@Mnemosyne: I stand corrected, you’re right. There were shenanigans, quite a bit of them. But legal shenanigans.
Cermet
@Emma: For NC, yes and that makes that state a lot closer (turn out was also an issue there); for MI-don’t think so. PA? Maybe some but not in Philly where most African Amerikans in PA live. Know less than zero on WI but that was a big lost there and not sure its black community was prevented anywhere near that level (again, could be wrong on that for WI.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
in a world where we could run tests on counterfactuals, that would be one of the interesting cases.
Emma
@Daulnay:
Hey trans kid who just got beat up again, too damn bad. Maybe you could just cut your throat and relieve us of the effort of defending you.
Hey, pregnant woman with a brainless fetus, too damn bad. Maybe you could just die of sepsis and relieve us of the effort of defending you.
Hey veteran retiree with PTSD, too damn bad. Maybe you can just shoot your family and yourself and relieve us of the effort of defending you.
You make me sick.
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
to me it’s “explain how the guy who couldn’t connect with the democratic base gets more democratic votes than the actual democrat”
fuckwit
@Major Major Major Major: She got Algore’d.
After some reflection, this election is 2000 all over again.
The media did their same bullshit: harp on the Democratic candidate all day long about trivial bullshit, and give the Rethug a pass. Then act surprised when he wins.
They think this is some kind of game, an entertainment. It is not.
PJ
@Peale: How much did the Iraq War vote and Bankruptcy bill vote matter for Hillary? Not much, I’d say, plus Biden had apologized for the Iraq War much sooner than Hillary. What most people would know him from were the last 8 years as Vice-President, which would make it much more a referendum about Obama, who has a 55% approval rating.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: @goblue72: Your candidate could not win. I guess you want us to court the people who hate blacks browns and queers?
Taylor
@gene108:
Employers want to get out of providing health insurance, it is killing US companies relative to their overseas competition. It’s the reason auto companies prefer to locate their plants in Canada rather than the US.
I always thought of ACA as laying the groundwork for that shift.
Emma
@Cermet: Why don’t you spend some time checking these things out? I kept track of a few places, mostly in the south, and yes, it was damn bad and it cost us plenty.
Doug R
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): They didn’t pick Trump, she got MORE VOTES.
Cermet
@Mnemosyne: Yes; I wasn’t saying he did well – only that you asked for an alternate to Bernie – he was better than Bernie (baggage wise) and certainly not an insider which would have helped in PA & WI
Hoodie
@Mnemosyne: I agree, but you have to hit someone in the mouth to make the point or they think you’re just whining. Like it or not, the presidency is a job that entails violence. However, a bunch of people gave Hillary endless shit for being too hawkish. She should have emphasized it more. Trump has no credibility on that other than empty talk about bombing the shit out of people; he’ll probably shit his pants if he’s in a real conflict. Hillary has actually bombed the shit out of people. Men often don’t have to act openly belligerent because violence is presumed to always be available; Obama has done some ruthlessly violent shit and no one thinks it’s out of character with all the hope and change stuff. That may be because white Americans think all black males are inherently violent, who knows. Trump had to act tough because otherwise he’s a pansy with a gold plated toilet.
Daulnay
@Cermet:
O’Malley? Nope. Chaffee? Nope. Webb? Nope. Lessig? Nope.
The Democratic primary bench was too thin, and Hillary’s grip on the party probably discouraged better candidates from running. If there’s any lesson to be learned, it’s that you shouldn’t let any candidate try to lock up the nomination before the primaries.
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
White voters voted for Trump in exactly the same proportions as they voted for Romney in 2012.
Voter suppression tipped the scales. But we’re supposed to ignore that, because minority votes were never real votes anyway, amirite?
Kathleen
@MisterForkbeard: Their masters and sycophantic selves will quickly learn how to do it. Their weasonality will prevail (hell, if Sara Palin has cabinet position I can do world salad, too).
James E Powell
@Mnemosyne:
This, like times a thousand.
fuckwit
@Scamp Dog: Another war and/or major terrorist strike will come within a year of inauguration day. Martial law will be declared. Guard units will be activated. Stop-loss will be revived.
There will be no 2018 election, nor a 2020.
We will find more in common with the Greenwald-ies in the coming years than we have in the past 8.
Davis X. Machina
@Major Major Major Major: This is the wrong line. The official line is that she will be cushioned from any grief by her millions, and be Hampton-partying with her real friends by Memorial Day.
Doesn’t anyone read the central committee’s newsletter?
Davis X. Machina
@Daulnay:
I’ll wait for the list. Everyone on it will be at least as flawed.
Richard Mayhew
@WereBear: we are not organized for a general strike. That is step 44 not step 1
PJ
@Mnemosyne: No way were Biden’s negatives anywhere close to Clinton’s. There are no emails, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation to tie him to. That’s all media/right wing bullshit, but you can’t pretend that stuff didn’t have a major effect on the election. He would have been carried much more by his association with Obama. And he’s a better speaker and politician than Hillary.
Cermet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I read she dropped her case – did I hear wrong? (which wouldn’t be all that surprising – I rarely access the internet and have no TV/cable or Sat.
Kay
We were talking at work today about whether Trump will blatantly lie as President as much as he did as a candidate.
That will be weird, if the new normal is just “oh the President lies constantly, about everything”
He’ll say “we created 60,000 jobs!” and people will think “probably made that up”
That’s banana republic stuff to me- the gas lighting. It’ll be scarier when it’s outright propaganda.
fuckwit
@Taylor: The requirement for employers to provide it will be greatly relaxed, or removed. No public plan will be provided to replace it.
The new national anthem is “Kill the Poor”.
It is 2001 all over again.
We have taken one giant step forwards, and two giant steps backwards.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I am just waiting for his signal that after a brief hiatus of advising us, *now* is actually the time for us to storm the streets and kill cops.
Davis X. Machina
@fuckwit:
With a side order of a different flavor of “But Tipper Gore wants to censor music”! irrelevant nonsense…
SgrAstar
@My Truth Hurts: It’s always about you, isn’t it.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Davis X. Machina: As many times as I’ve seen this type of comment I’ve never see the fucking list.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: I presume you’re not talking to me.
gene108
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
From relatives living in MD, O’Malley came off as someone, who did what he did because he had eyes on higher office, whether mayor of Baltimore or governor.
What he proposed checked off boxes that appeals to liberals, like universal pre-K, but on the whole how to pay for it, he was a lot vaguer and that created problems.
Felonius Monk
@PJ:
This is very unproductive horseshit. What you and a number of others here are doing is simply masturbating in public and it is neither pretty nor productive. And it certainly isn’t pleasurable.
If there had been a better candidate then they most likely would have been nominated. The idea that there was some magic candidate that was being denied the opportunity is total bullshit. There weren’t any. The ones that did enter the race didn’t and couldn’t cut the mustard.
We need to be looking forward. There’s work to be done. So, let’s get to it and stop this fucking around.
Cermet
@Daulnay: I say we follow the Kan’s words – crush and listen to their Lamentations …let the thugs cut off their disability checks and other services – Blue states can pick up much for their own – and watch as thugs lose office after office as dem ride a wave of popular revolt …ok, I can dream.
Peale
@Kay: I wonder if he’ll just stop talking to the press and hold his own weekly call in show. Not the weekly radio address, but something like Chavez used to do in Venezuela.
Davis X. Machina
@PJ:
He’d have been ravaged from the Left as Senator MBNA, from the right as a brain-damaged Obama retread.
And that’s before the gaffe machine warmed up.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@gene108: Don’t forget the Rain Tax, that pissed off a lot of people, and was probably one of the reasons Hogan was elected.
FlipYrWhig
@WarMunchkin:
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. #sartreJuice
Cain
Ladies and Gentleman – Day One of Trump’s America
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, I have no idea how that happened. I blame wordpress being shit.
Bailey
@Cermet:
Thank you. I certainly feel bad for Hillary being humiliated like that (again) on such a national stage and know that is hard and commend her for pulling herself together enough and putting on a face to make that concession speech, her feelings are not even remotely my primary concern.
I feel far worse for Obama than I do for Hillary. All of Obama’s work is about to be wiped out. Barack and Michelle and Joe Biden and every other high profile Dem tried to lift Hillary up and carry her dead fish campaign up and over the finish line. That they nearly made it is astonishing. But now Obama, the most distinguished and talented, open-minded and big-hearted politician of my lifetime has to hand the White House keys to the king of the birthers, endorsed by the KKK. Obama is far more the tragic figure here.
But most of all, it’s us that are in deep trouble here. I feel sorry for the country. I don’t think we deserved this.
Cermet
@Scamp Dog: Not so sure of that – don’t panic yet; the small handed dick head might …might keep his promise that no one will lose their health insurance and that, he might, again, might really follow through on. I very much hope so; so don’t give in to depression, yet.
Cain
@Davis X. Machina:
He’d have been ravaged from the Left as Senator MBNA, from the right as a brain-damaged Obama retread.
And that’s before the gaffe machine warmed up.
As Trump has proved, gaffe’s don’t matter if you own them. Against Trump, what would gaffe’s matter? We are playing with a completely different set of rules.
Mnemosyne
@sukabi:
I keep saying that this felt more like 2010 to me. Interesting that Raw Story referenced that as well.
Davis X. Machina
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: When it does make one of its rare appearances, it usually features ornaments to the progressive cause like Corey Booker and Andrew Cuomo.
FlipYrWhig
@Davis X. Machina: And then when he lost the media would say, “Well, Chris, a lot of people are saying this defeat was inevitable, and they’re surprised that the Democrats didn’t try harder to connect with women of all ages, a key demographic for the party for decades.”
Patricia Kayden
@SenyorDave: I thought the fact that Powell and Rice admittedly used a similar email set up as Secretary Clinton made what she did a non-issue. To this present day, I haven’t heard what she did wrong and certainly nothing she did regarding her email server is anything close to being criminal. This has been a witch hunt and it needs to stop.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I also too, would like to see Daulnay’s list.
@gene108: if you compare the way he talked about HRC in 2008, when he thought he might be Veep, to the way he talked in 2012, that theory is plausible.
Was it O’Malley who is said to be the model for Tommy Carcetti on the Wire?
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
We have a spare room here in California. Our legislature has already planned to block the Feds’ attempts to reverse any of our gains.
Peale
@Davis X. Machina: Booker? Mr. Private Equity is bad when Romney does it, but I get too much money from them to condem them outright?
Kay
@Peale:
We were saying any stats they released would just be made up- ‘the trade deficit is one dollar”
People will look at each other and say “that sounds made-up. Is it?”
Davis X. Machina
@FlipYrWhig: Absolutely….
Run someone young, they’re inexperienced.
Run someone old, they’re out of touch.
Run someone white, they’re a slap in the face to the base.
Run someone black, they’re courting disaster with the white working class.
It’ll always be something — and from within the party just as often as from without.
EBT
@Mnemosyne: Medi-cal is nothing short of a godsend.
Patricia Kayden
@Cermet: It must be shocking to you that many of us love Secretary Clinton and admire her accomplishments. And yes, we are sorry to see that she lost and sad for her on a personal level. I have no idea why you think we all need to share your obvious contempt for a woman who has done no one any harm. Save your hatred for Trump.
Mai.naem.mobile
I like Buren but he has health issues,the Bank bill,the Delaware protection stuff,the plagiarism,the Anita Hill stuff which would have been aimed at AAs to depress turnout,the silly flubs and ,oh yeah, he was against the OBL raid. That’s stuff I know off the top of my head. The Dem bench is on the thin side and the Clintons didn’t exactly help and neither did Obama when he picked Sebelius and Napolitano for Cabinet jobs. But,HRC was not a bad candidate.
Cermet
@Emma: Sorry but I have limits; I am working (for real) on a theory that unites gravity and quantum mechanic (before thinking I am total nuts, I wrote a short book on quantum mechanics and solid state theory and it was used at my Grad school; I have a Graduate degree in Physics & developed a way to make glass flexible (peer reviewed and published.) So, besides posting here, making a living I do a few extra things. So, can’t be an expert on all subjects.
PJ
@Felonius Monk: No. We (Democrats) need to figure out why we lost this election and what can be done to prevent that from happening in the future. Many people here are saying that Hillary was a wonderful candidate and there’s nothing more that could have been done by anyone because America is a racist, sexist cesspool. It may be a racist, sexist cesspool, but that’s the electorate we have to work with. I think that Hillary was a poor candidate, and that Biden could have won where she did not (and Obama, obviously could have as well). Why didn’t Biden run? Because Hillary had sucked up a huge amount of endorsements and money prior to the official start of the primary season. She wanted it and she was going to do everything possible to get the nomination. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but there is something wrong with every major Democratic player lining up behind her long before the primaries, because it inhibits other people – people who might stand a better chance of winning the general election – from running.
Mnemosyne
@Daulnay:
And bite our tongues when we don’t get any respect back, even the ordinary kind.
Or, as most non-white, non-straight, non-male people already call it, every fucking day of our lives.
Davis X. Machina
@Peale: Hey, he pulls people from burning buildings. You want that, and someone untainted by contact with money? That’s a big ask.
gene108
@Kay:
I wonder, if Trump will purge the BLS and put in his own people, who churn out the numbers that he wants churned out?
The whole system of checks and balances breaks down, when one Party in power does not give a damn about much of anything other than staying in power and all the rules and conventions of 240 years get chucked out the window for political gain, such as the abuse of the filibuster or blocking Judge Garland’s nomination.
dogwood
@gene108:
The rape charge was withdrawn a couple of weeks ago.
Davis X. Machina
@PJ:
Two words — James Madison
Cermet
@Patricia Kayden: You are either reading someone else’s posts or not reading mine. I admire Hillary – supported her and through these posts agree that woman are treated as second class citizens – please try to read my comments for what I say and not try and read into them things I didn’t say and NEVER even implied. Thank you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just the opposite, as I recall. Cory Lieberbooker said the Obama campaign made him sick for being so mean to the Job Creators of VC in his flop-sweat maiden appearance on MTP.
SgrAstar
@gene108: There is no rape case. The accuser withdrew her accusations. There is, however the very real Trump University fraud case, starting I believe on November 28.
Fair Economist
@Cain:
They’d matter because the press would only have focused on Biden’s gaffes and ignored Trump’s. Same as how Trump is 10 times more likely to lie in the Bayesian sense but Clinton gets called the liar; or how she ran an A-rated highly effective charity vs. his crooked slush fund but she’s “corrupt”.
Davis X. Machina
@PJ:
List, please. Whom precisely did Clinton run off before the campaign even started?
Mnemosyne
@James E Powell:
This. All of it.
gene108
@PJ:
He’s in his mid-70’s and wants to retire? At some point a person gets tired of going to work everyday.
Felonius Monk
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
There’s only one name on any of this supposed lists, you know that. It’s Bernie-Boo.
Daulnay
@EBT:
Nope. No point in courting hate-fueled bigots. But it is worth listening to people who complain about ‘blacks and minorities cutting in line’, even if you think they are wrong. Maybe there’s a fire under that smoke that isn’t simple racism (and obviously the racism adds to the smoke).
There was and is a truth behind the ‘blacks and minorities cutting in line’ problem, that made people open to a racist appeal. The entire bottom 80% of Americans have been in a zero-sum economic game since the early 80s, so any group’s gains came only at the loss of some other groups. If you accept that 1) the bottom 80% made no economic progress on average since the early 80s (which the statistics show) and 2) that minority groups and/or women made gains, then it’s just mathematics to show that their gains necessarily cost other (white male) groups.
The root of the problem is that the top took all the gains, that the ‘line wasn’t moving’. But people saw others ‘cutting in line’ — which we liberals endorse to make up for past wrongs and for economic fairness. It is very hard to stomach being pushed downwards economically, especially if others are not. If the pain were universally shared, that feels very different.
Did the Dems campaign on this? Did we nominate a firebrand who promised to take on the people funding the party and raking off all the economic gains? We nominated someone who took large speaking fees from the bankers who have been plundering our economy. If that isn’t an own goal, what is?
Patricia Kayden
@PJ: Howard Dean wants to run the 50-state strategy again and resume his position as the head of the DNC. Sounds fabulous to me. DWS was not an effective DNC Chair. And Donna Brazile kind of embarrassed herself when she was forced off of CNN.
GrandJury
@dogwood: Did you ever stop and think why? Lawyer makes a very public announcement that she is holding a press conference. Conference cancelled at the last minute. A few days later the lawsuit is withdrawn.
Connect the dots. She was probably paid off to keep her mouth shut. She wasn’t asking for that much in the lawsuit. Only about $75k I think.
EBT
@gene108: The presidency will absolutely ruin Trump’s already flagging health.
Betsy
@Major Major Major Major: Faugh! I say. Faugh!
Oh well.
Maybe your program/analyzer/thingy could be the basis for a fun fundraiser on BJ some time. Everyone make a suggested donation to find out one’s key phrases.
James E Powell
@Davis X. Machina:
If there were anyone who could have done it, we’d all know the name.
SenyorDave
@Patricia Kayden: OTOH, the Trumprapist has used his charity as a personal slush fund.
Emma
@Cermet: But you can have an opinion on them. Me, I don’t know crap about quantum anything — actually I admire unconditionally anyone who can, But I wouldn’t opine on their work.
EBT
@Daulnay: Whites under 50K broke for Hillary though?
Mai.naem.mobile
You are living in the world of Kardashians. You have to have a candidate who can keep up with the Kardashians. Young,photogenic,publicity hungry,salesman,interesting even if a trainwreck.
matryoshka
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Jim, I just showed your retweets to a well-off white man (a doctor) who reassured me that everything is going to be fine, because the kind of things I fear won’t happen, not here, because “people won’t let them.” He said, “Well, you know, people just make that stuff up.” Because of course they do, just to feed my hysteria.
Patricia Kayden
@Daulnay:
What is the “truth behind the ‘blacks and minorities cutting in line’ problem”? As a Black woman, I’d like to hear exactly how I’m cutting in line.
Mnemosyne
@PJ:
I think you’ve missed the various Berniebros who have been showing up here and smugly declaring that they didn’t vote for Hillary because of her Iraq war vote and her ties to the big banks. But they would have voted for Biden!
For those guys, it’s all about the peni$. Hillary didn’t have one, so they were Outraged about the things she did even though Biden did the exact same things.
But misogyny wasn’t a factor here, the straight white guys keep telling me …
Davis X. Machina
@Patricia Kayden Invocation of Howard Dean and the 50-state strategy is essentially the progressive version of a Melanesian cargo cult, with “Howard Dean” instead of “John Frum”.
Archon
I think an argument can be made that Trump’s Presidency will be scandal proof, that no scandal committed by him or his administration will dim the view of his supporters. Especially when considering that Republicans in Congress will be nothing more then sycophants to the Republican President, as they always are.
gogol's wife
Please forgive if this has already been posted 1000 times, but I don’t have the heart to read the thread and I think it’s important. A petition has been started to try to get the Electoral College to elect Hillary. A Hail-Mary pass, but better than hailing Mary on our knees.
Patricia Kayden
@SenyorDave: And no one except those of us on the left are even talking about all of Trump’s financial shenanigans. It’s almost like no one cares. Well, Eichenwald and Farenthold did a great job of actually investigating Trump’s business dealings and his charitable giving (or lack thereof) but otherwise the media gave Trump scandals a pass.
Baud
@James E Powell:
You do!
Mnemosyne
@Daulnay:
Name. The. Better. Candidates.
Kay
Jake Tapper STILL has a Clinton campaign email pinned:
https://twitter.com/jaketapper
The multimillionaire Men of Cable News are so insufferably smug about Clinton, it’s unbearable.
Major Major Major Major
@Betsy: Mostly people just thought it was creepy :P
Your info’s in there, it just takes a little while to run and I’m on the wrong computer and frankly don’t feel like it. Coding is work when you’re not in the mood, after all, and even sometimes then.
Davis X. Machina
@James E Powell: People who follow this stuff saw Obama coming before he ever hit the Senate. They don’t ever ‘come out of nowhere’, not really. I knew who Carter was in 1972… and Clinton in 1986 or so.
Patricia Kayden
@Davis X. Machina: Why? It worked.
Davis X. Machina
@Baud: Baud, dear friend, sorry, but your e-mail server sysadmin problem dooms you from jump.
Baud
@Kay: They won. Smugness comes with the territory.
PJ
@Davis X. Machina: Jesus, how many times do I have to say it: Biden. You may, as many people here do, think he wouldn’t have been better, but I’ve given my arguments why I think he would have.
Elizabelle
I foresee a string of successful midnight showings of “Idiocracy.”
Although it may not seem as funny. Still, good to see Mike Judge making some money off the Dumpster.
goblue72
@Major Major Major Major: I summarized it months ago and was lambasted as a closet racist because most folks here can’t see anything except in caricature.
It means keeping the coalition we have but adding to it. Because the current one doesn’t have enough consistent voters in it. Part of that is working class / lower middle class whites. Because a lot of them used to vote Democrat. And I am not talking about Reagan Democrats who left 30 plus years ago. And we don’t need ALL of them. But we do need some, and the some amount we need is “more” than what got now.
And I don’t think we even need “some” of them from everywhere. I don’t think chasing downwardly mobile white voters in Mississippi or North Dakota or South Carolina is worth it. That ship has long since sailed, and culturally we just ain’t getting them without completing abandoning our current base. Nor should we. But there are downwardly mobile white voters that we CAN get. Some of them we had until fairly recently. Others have been trending away, but no reason we can’t get them back. WI, PA, MI – and that means taking them back at not just the Presidential level. There’s also IA and OH, which swing back and forth and its time to figure out how to not only get them Blue but perma-blue. Missouri – which is often a straight down the middle state, which Dems CAN in win in. Its a state that has a Dem US Senator and a Dem Governor. Indiana as a whole is likely impossible to crack, but we should be trying to make some inroads to whittle away at the edges. Kansas is crazytown, but taking some districts? Why the hell not. Heck, even goddamn Illinois. They have 18 House seats and we only got 10. Shit, look at PA – 18 House seat. GOP has 13!
That is a staring point. Those are not crackers. Are a lot of them kinda Archie Bunker-ish. Probably. But if the only people we aim to appeal to are nice college educated liberals who know was intersectionality and micro-aggressions are, we are going to keep losing. And MOST of public policy stuff WE want to do, is mostly stuff they’d be generally ok with. We may have hold a gun to the DNC’s head and say “you will abandon this free trade bullshit NOW” but so what. We claim to be a working people’s party. And guess what – there’s a good number of working people who can be kinda racist-y. Sucks, but that’s life. You win, you get to govern. You lose, you get the screw job.
After that, there’s expanding our footprint in the Mountain West. Bigger footprints in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada. Arizona is crazytown where most of the white people are cranky retirees. Waste of time there. I have no idea what to do about Texas, but its not at the top of the list.
Major Major Major Major
@Patricia Kayden: Dean was fine, Dean was good, sure, give it to him. I think DXM is speaking more to the people who go “50-state strategy! Glass-Steagall! Overturn Citizens United! FAIRNESS DOCTRINE!!” as cures for all our ills.
Daulnay
@Davis X. Machina:
Let’s start with the obvious: Elizabeth Warren. Julian Castro.
And there are plenty of Democrats who are at least as well known as O’Malley but didn’t run.
Mnemosyne
@PJ:
Well, at least you acknowledged that the whole emails/Benghazi/Clinton Foundation thing was bullshit. And, frankly, a lot of that is on us, the rank and file Democrats, for not defending her.
Like someone else said, Biden running is an interesting thought experiment, but he didn’t run. As I said above, he may well have done better because he’s a white man and the Berniebros would have flocked to him.
MisterForkbeard
@Cermet: I think this is actually the most important lesson. Now, the order of the day is to completely ignore reality and never apologize for ANYTHING. This is the new style of campaigning going forward.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
In the short term this is bunk. We have an oil glut and are producing record amounts of oil already. If they drill for still more oil they’ll just lose money.
cmorenc
@SenyorDave:
Ironically the first problem Trump-shit’s energy exploitation plan is going to run onto is a simple free-market problem: there’s already such an ample supply of oil at the current price of $45 that lots of already-established fracking sites are shut down because it’s uneconomic to exploit them. The second problem is that the reason new coal power plants aren’t being built in the US isn’t only for environmental considerations; it’s becoming uneconomic compared to natural gas. The third problem wrt his “war on coal” appeal to coalfield workers in Appalachia is that mechanization, rather than environmental restrictions on coal, are responsible for the lion’s share of displaced workers. Trump’s ignorant energy strategy is very good for the Koch Brothers though, even though they didn’t support his election campaign.
Corner Stone
@Patricia Kayden:
My goodness, thank you. I have grown tired of reading Daulney’s nonsense one-notism and determinative attitude to not understand what a multitude of diverse people here are saying. So I completely scrolled past that little quote.
Now I know my decision was correct, but for other reasons also, too.
Daulnay
@EBT:
Trump’s health may kill him during his first term, but I don’t think the stress of office will speed his demise. He’s going to make Reagan look like a positively hands-on president.
Kathleen
@Jeffro: Some print outlets have done stellar work. Other than JoyAnn Reid and Soledad O’Brien, who in the broadcast media has?
Schlemazel
@EBT:
I sort of wish the tertiary syphilis finishes him off but then we get Pence and he is no treat
Major Major Major Major
@goblue72: I thought this was a pretty good read that sounds like sort of what you’re talking about. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/9/1594721/-Hello-America-From-Kansas-You-re-Like-Us-Now-Let-s-Talk-About-What-s-Next
Davis X. Machina
@Patricia Kayden: That’s a very broad claim, with only the most equivocal evidence behind it. I was active in ME state politics that year, and their footprint here was so small as to be unnoticeable. Kay’s OH experience was similar.
In 2006 my cat Max could have beaten the GOP bloody, by then Bush and they were toxic.
There is a lot of post-hoc ergo-propter-hoc-ery involved.
Everything in politics is over-determined. The range of potential causes far outstrips the number of available effects.
Archon
@Daulnay:
Are blacks perceived as “cutting in line” or are they living in a dystopian nightmare that Trump described?
I’m confused.
EBT
@goblue72: You spent a lot of words to not actually suggest a course of action. HOW do we appeal to that demographic? I guess we could just straight up lie and say yes all the jobs you personally think are good are coming back?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Daulnay: Neither’s strength as a national candidate is “obvious”
EBT
@Schlemazel: Yeah Pence is a woman hating misogynist, and has many many other deep deep failings. I doubt he would shoot a nuke at a country because one of their boats flipped us off.
Davis X. Machina
@cmorenc: Apparently no one in WV or KY or southern IL ever heard the words “Powder River Basin”.
Omnes Omnibus
@PJ: His son died. His heart wasn’t in it at the time.
Lizzy L
To the folks (Cermet, Daulney, goblue72, any others) who appear to want to (incessantly) analyze why Trump won and why Hillary lost: I assume you are posting in good faith. I have a suggestion. Consider that this may not be the best moment for this discussion. Most of us are angry, frightened, horrified, and raw. In a week or two, I/we may be able to hear what you want to say, but it’s not getting through right now, and it’s exacerbating wounds. I suggest you just back off.
MisterForkbeard
@Patricia Kayden: There’s been some pretty interesting research on this, actually. Assuming I’m reading your conversation correctly.
It’s not that you’re cutting in line, but you are keeping your place in it and not letting the white dudes in front of you. There’s been a very real relationship change between the privileged white men and everyone else in that the ‘everyone else’ was starting to get treated almost fairly. To the white guys, this is a very real loss of ‘relative’ power, and they feel that loss keenly.
tl;dr: Racist/sexist fucks rightly feel they were losing their dominance. The SHOULD lose it, but this feeling of loss is very real to them because it is actually happening.
Davis X. Machina
@Daulnay: Warren finished 8 points behind Obama on the same ballot, in the country’s bluest state. Hella campaigner there.
Castro’s 2004 Obama, not 2008 Obama, if he’s Obama at all.
Daulnay
@liberal:
Things will get that bad for non-Jews first, especially Muslims. And don’t discount the stupidity and cussedness of people – if Trump can deliver prosperity a lot of people will excuse a little ‘innocent’ anti-Semitism and there won’t be any civil war.
Mnemosyne
@PJ:
Because his beloved oldest son died of a brain tumor shortly before Biden would have had to announce his candidacy. Biden himself said that he didn’t have the heart to run because of that.
But, please, continue building your little conspiracy theory about why Hillary STOLE the chance from him. Don’t forget to call her Queen Hillary and complain that she expected a “coronation.” Which is totally non-sexist, amirite?
EBT
@Omnes Omnibus: I wanted his son to run at some point so fucking much.
Kay
@gogol’s wife:
I don’t agree with it. The country elected Trump and a hard Right one-Party congress. They should get all of that.
Actions have to have consequences or there’s no accountability. They don’t know the first thing about this person but they were more than happy to put me and my family at risk. They should get all the downside risk they exposed the rest of us to. Trump looks terrified in that still shot when he met with Obama. The big boasting braggart got a job he’s not remotely qualified to do. I hope he’s up nights worrying and I hope all his screeching fans are too. They better hope to God nothing big happens the next 4 years because all they have is Donald Trump and the chickenshit GOP leadership between them and a catastrophe.
Major Major Major Major
@Davis X. Machina: I always liked Booker.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@goblue72: Go forth, brave little soldier, the people of Goddam Illinois await the mad grassroots organizing skills of Dwight, The Keyboard Revolutionary. Report back in three or four years. We’ll miss you, of course, but the Revolution needs you.
Davis X. Machina
@Daulnay:
I await their names.
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
Omnes Omnibus
@Cermet:
Trump won WI by about 27,000. Around 300,000 registered WI voters were not able to get an ID that was valid for voting. Most of them were AA.
FlipYrWhig
@PJ:
This is from a NYT postmortem on the election:
Sounds about right, right?
Here’s my take: Biden does better with Group A — and plummets with college-educated suburban, young, Latino, and African-American voters, and loses anyway, and what we hear today is WHY DID THEY PICK SUCH AN OLD GUY WHO EVERYONE REMEMBERS FROM CODDLING BANKS AND CLARENCE THOMAS! And ALL THAT SHOUTING IN THE DEBATES REALLY TURNED PEOPLE OFF AND JUST AS WE’D FINALLY MADE BREAKTHROUGHS ON THE WHOLE MANSPLAINING ISSUE
dogwood
@Davis X. Machina:
I saw a Charlie Rose interview in ’08 with some Bush JD lawyers who were on the Harvard Law Review with Obama. None were surprised that he would become POTUS.
Daulnay
@Lizzy L:
Heard. I will stop.
gene108
@goblue72:
And how do you appeal to those voters? Serious question.
If guaranteeing healthcare did not win them over, what will? If saving the auto industry did not win over voters in Ohio and Michigan, what will?
What do they want that they are not getting from Democrats?
Gravenstone
@FlipYrWhig: I really hope NBC pulls Katy Tur off his press detail going forward. He’s stirred up so much shit against her among his mouth breathers, she simply isn’t safe in that environment.
Cain
@Felonius Monk:
You are being deliberate there. He was talking about building a proper coalition, this is about messaging it doesn’t matter who the candidate is, it was about how to reach out there. It should be clear by now that you can’t win shit without the rust belters. So you’re going to have to figure out a way to reach out to them.. but more than that, the man gave you statistics about what is happening. We are losing and we’re focusing on the presidency and federal posts, and we are losing them where it counts.
Mary G
Thanks to everybody in the last thread who said they weren’t looking at the news too. I was feeling stupid, because I feel like the cat “hiding” behind the curtain, but I’m just so fragile still.
God bless my fellow Californians. We went to run errands and get my blood test and I turned on the KNX 1070 news radio because I was so anxious to know what had set John off. There are protests all over. Police have issued warnings to motorists to drive extra slowly near high schools because so many kids have hit the street spontaneously. EVEN USC, home of Richie-Rich kids, who hung Jane Fonda in effigy many times in my day, had a march.
People are making it clear they’re not going away. They were tut-tutting about protestors going onto the freeways, and an anchor spoke to a lovely reverend who very politely told him to go fuck himself *not in so many words. Walking on the freeway is necessary because they don’t get attention if they don’t, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be on the freeway today. When the anchor said MLK didn’t get on freeways in the day, he laughed. He resisted all attempts to cut him off until he finished explaining that non-violent resistance doesn’t mean “we won’t inconvenience you in any way.” I was cheering after they played Liz Warren.
They spent an amazing amount of time on it for a station that allegedly gives you the whole world in 20 minutes. When they started to say “President-el…” I turned it off.
catbirdman
“Sarah Palin, Secretary of the Interior.” Seriously, if that’s the way this goes, you’re going to see monkeywrenching on a grand scale. Calexit, anyone?
EBT
@Gravenstone: He probably won’t let them cover him until they fire her, and Maddow.
Daulnay
@Davis X. Machina:
If you’re going to blithely dismiss Elizabeth Warren, there’s no point in going on. And once again I am going to go back to lurking, the stupid hurts.
James E Powell
@Davis X. Machina:
That’s what I’m saying.
FlipYrWhig
@goblue72:
Do we? Seems like the people loudest-and-proudest about being Working People are all Republicans. Let them go fix that party.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
Yes! We were fools not to support your candidacy, Baud! ?
Daulnay
@gene108:
What everyone wants. They want to be listened to, and given some respect.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Camus.
Felonius Monk
@gogol’s wife:
A Fool’s Errand.
MisterForkbeard
@Daulnay: There were a few comments from earlier about how Warren is a good politician but not a great campaigner. I actually tend to agree, at least in regards to her first Senate run. She underperformed Obama by quite a bit and didn’t win by too much.
She might be a lot better at this now. She certainly is known as someone willing to bruise her hand to get in a good punch.
Kay
We have a bailiff at the court who is my friend, Rex. Rex is a Democrat and he’s really upset about Trump winning. The county commissioners meet in the courthouse and one of them is far Right wing. He went over to brag to Rex and Rex told him to “piss off” which is bad because Rex works for the county commissioners. I felt so bad for him. They’re going to seek revenge.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: Camus-juice
Ew.
FlipYrWhig
@Cain:
I think the only thing that matters is who the candidate is. No one voted for Trump because Trump was doing to do… things. They voted for him because it would piss off the people who use the word “gender” and tell them that eating meat is bad and that you shouldn’t say “retarded” anymore. It was Rolling Coal in a weird orange wrapper.
Davis X. Machina
@Daulnay:
I will not have labored in vain, then.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: Zut alors, le mot juste!
Bailey
@Mnemosyne:
Hillary lost 6-8 million votes that Obama had in 2008 and 2012. Are you saying there is some evidence out there that voter suppression kept that many people from the polls?
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Point taken, but I’d like to add a caveat (been doing a lot of that lately). From the article:
Here’s the thing: the numbers are still not quite stable, but I’m betting that more of these folks went for Trump than the Clinton campaign was betting on. College-educated voters, especially in suburban areas, have gone for Republicans for years. They may not have liked Trump’s style, but a lot of them were on Team R and made their peace with him anyway.
Davis X. Machina
@gene108:
Burning crosses. And those adorbs robes.
Mike in dc
Multicultural economic populist progressivism is the way forward, but it’s a formula that has not been fully developed yet. I do think that the 3d way/new democrat/dlc/corporatist approach is basically dying, and we should do what we can to hasten its demise.
FlipYrWhig
@Daulnay: And if you want “listening” and “respect,” you pretty much have to go with the world’s acknowledged master of those skills, Donald J. Trump!
Kathleen
@Cacti: All they do is make up bullshit anyway.
Mnemosyne
@catbirdman:
United States of Pacifica: California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. I’m in!
Davis X. Machina
@PJ: And I have given my arguments why I think he would not.
Chris Dodd, with a marginally better storyline.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: I think you might turn out to be right. Still, it was a logical play: if your candidate’s a grandmother who’s put up with a lot of shit, have her run on how embarrassing and exasperating it is to listen to that fool.
Omnes Omnibus
@Patricia Kayden: As a white man, I am interested as well.
Davis X. Machina
@Mike in dc: You’ll notice Mrs. Clinton reached the same conclusion, between 2006 and 2014…
Smart lady, her.
jenn
Someone up above (Cermet?) said that Hillary lost WI by a lot of votes:
From Ari Berman:
Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes. For perspective, 300,000 registered voters in WI lacked strict voter ID.
Would that have made a difference? Quite possibly yes, though of course no way to know. Voter suppression was active in a lot of places we thought we would have won.
Peale
@Bailey: O.K. you too, knock it off. There are actually two different issues here. I do believe that vote supression really did cost the election in Wisconsin. But that was just one state. It may have cost the election in the many very close swing states, which were very, very close. That’s one story.
Has anyone seen a state by state total for that drop off? Or do I have to do it myself? Was it in primarily blue states like New York where voters might have said “Meh, she’ll win my state anyway”. Was it in the South? It is a huge drop off, and regardless how it was spread it does indicate that voters weren’t turning out, which probably reflected in why the election was so close in some of these states that voter suppression tactics could swing the election.
I keep hearing in all of these swing states that she hit her numbers, but I’m still wondering why the heck her target numbers were set so low.
CaseyL
@Emerald:
I’ve been reading Sarah Kendzior’s tweets; they’re enraging. We’re in for hell on Earth. This country will be unrecognizable in less than one year.
What can we do? Organize? Organize what? Protests, demonstrations – if anyone pays attention to them anymore, it’s only to complain about how they inconvenience people. Rise up? Rise up how? The US has the biggest, best, and best equipped armed forces in the world – you think Trump will hesitate to use them against insurrectionists? Boycott the MSM? Their audience has already shrunk to pretty much the same people who support Trump. The ones who aren’t just cynically interested in ratings are cowards already normalizing the outrages Trump has very helpfully let everyone know he’s planning.
I’m honestly at a loss. The only thing I can think of that can stop Trump is large-scale, organized violence… and the people with the monopoly on that, the US Armed Forces, are not about to start an armed revolution. They’re far more likely to put it down.
MisterForkbeard
@Bailey: If suppression stopped possibly even 10% of that number, you have enough to tip the scales.
Suppression is one of many problems in the election. It took a confluence of many factors for Hillary to lose the election, and unfortunately we hit all of them. But because she COULD have done better and overcome those negatives does not excuse that the negatives exist, right?
FlipYrWhig
@Mike in dc: I don’t think any presidential campaign has gone to the DLC toolkit since Gore. They were still doing it for Senate races until pretty recently, though.
Mnemosyne
@Bailey:
Look at Omnes’ post above: 300,000 missing in Wisconsin alone. Add that up over four states — five if you include North Carolina, where they’re currently estimating that the Black vote was cut by 8 percent because of early voting changes.
But, sure, let’s ignore that fucking scandal and concentrate on attracting white voters instead.
Peale
@Mike in dc: Oh. I agree. I actually fully intend to to let the Bernie supporters pick the candidate next time in the primary so we won’t have this kind of post election piddle again. Within REASON Bernie Voters. Within REASON please.
Cain
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, I agree that there is likely a subset of people who are like that, but they can’t all be that way. We reach the people we can intelligently reach. These guys don’t give a shit and no message is going to reach them because they aren’t conservative, they are just anti-liberal. The only way to reach them is when the party they identify with screws them over.
jenn
@Peale: I don’t have state by state, but I do have this:
Also, from Justin Miller: Justin Miller @justinjm1 22h22 hours ago
Clinton lost PA, MI, WI by 109,000 votes—or less people can than fit in Michigan Stadium (115,000)
goblue72
@EBT: Considering you all have had the WRONG answer, onus on you bub.
Some of us have been RIGHT all this time about the problem. You don’t even think its a problem. Scoreboard says otherwise.
Cain
@Mnemosyne:
Join us, if I recall, the republican plan is to give the power to the states so that they do all the land give away, but all the successful states that make money are blue states.. so fuck em. :-) We can fuck the rest of the nation quite easily at that point by cooperating with each other to fund everything without a federal mandate.
Mnemosyne
@Peale:
I would very much like to see that myself. All of the percentages seem to be pretty much the same as 2012. Someone linked a Raw Story article way above that I responded to that was a poll analysis.
jenn
@Bailey: Are you comparing Clinton’s final numbers to Obama’s? Last I heard, there were still votes being counted, though that may have changed by now.
FlipYrWhig
@Peale: I’d like to know too — spot check just now looks like Florida up slightly, Pennsylvania up slightly, Virginia down slightly..
goblue72
@jenn: Clinton won Colorado by less than 75,000 votes. Clinton won Nevada by slight over 26,000 votes. So on and so forth. We can play this stupid game all night.
Felonius Monk
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
We could be impolite and call this “Daulnay’s Wet Dream”.
Archon
@Bailey:
The black vote dropped most in the states that implemented new voter suppression laws. Are we supposed to look at that as a coincidence? Or better yet are we supposed to think Republicans implemented those laws risking a major optics hit for shits and giggles?
Cain
@CaseyL: federalize the blue states, and build a coalition to help each other. We don’t need the goddam federal government, we’ll use the same damn principles the republicans use. We can organize too.
Davis X. Machina
@jenn: I think this requires, at a minimum, blowing up the existing Democratic Party and starting from scratch. As a proportional response.
Omnes Omnibus
@Daulnay: When has she shown the slightest glimmer of a possibility that she was interested in running?
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
Over 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin alone were denied the right to vote because they did not have the proper ID.
But the problem is that we didn’t attract the white male vote. Right.
FlipYrWhig
@Peale: NO MORE CANDIDATES FAVORED BY MIDDLE AGED WOMEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR WE NEED SOMEONE LIKED BY THE PARTY BASE WHICH IS DEFINITELY NOT THOSE I ASSUME
Davis X. Machina
@MisterForkbeard: Everything in politics is overdetermined. There are way more causes on offer than the very narrow range of effects. (Basically win/loss.)
EBT
@goblue72: So you don’t have an answer just wanted to say “I told you so” well fuck you running you worthless piece of shit, shitstain go eat a bullet.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cain: Trump, like Romney, got a lot of the “Run the country like a business” vote, largely from people who don’t know that if this were possible, their state and/or demographic would be spun off, phased out, or shut down outright.
PJ
@Omnes Omnibus: No, I get it, and completely understand. I think he wanted to be President, but didn’t want to run for President. And if he had really wanted it, he would have started raising money and support right after the 2012 election, when Hillary did. But I do think he saw the amounts Hillary had hoovered up and, that, combined with Beau getting sick again and dying, was enough for him to realize he didn’t want to have to fight that much for it.
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
Colorado and Nevada don’t have restrictive voter ID laws designed specifically to suppress minority voters.
Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio do have those suppressive laws, and they were all implemented AFTER 2012.
But it was all a co-inkydink, I’m sure. The real problem was that we weren’t nice enough to white men.
Quinerly
@Gravenstone:
Tur is from tough stock. Google her background and who her parents are. Plus, she lived with Keith Olbermann for awhile. I was looking forward to her book…..when Trump lost.
Peale
@FlipYrWhig: That’s why I added “Within Reason.” I mean Rod Strickland was the candidate in Ohio who was still running that 1990s style campaign where he was spending more time running around rurual areas than appealing to the actual Democrats that he had. And he lost big. No need to have that kind of fiasco.
Look, I tried to find a copy of the Democratic 2012 “Post Mortem”. I would have assumed that when its candidate lost 5 million voters, someone looked into who they were and that Hillary had a plan to get them back. I mean just because your candidate WON doesn’t mean you do a reality check, right? Right? A customer satisfaction study at least?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
well said, and I realize that any politician at his level with enough breath to speak these words is lying, but hadn’t he said around 2012 that he had no interest in running?
PJ
@Mnemosyne: For FSM’s sake, you have such an obsession with Hillary that you can’t see that there might be problems with her candidacy (ETA: #1: SHE LOST, even though she had $2,000,000 more than Trump.) If you want her to run again in 2020, go ahead, but I think there might be others who don’t want to repeat the mistakes of this campaign.
frosty fred
@Emma: Yes, exactly.
Archon
@Mike in dc:
“Multicultural economic populist progressivism”, sounds good on paper until you realize that progressives have been running into brick walls on that idea for 150 years, and NOTHING about this election suggested we are any closer to changing that.
Kathleen
@GrandJury: .I also read somewhere threats were involved.
Davis X. Machina
@PJ: She lost three states by a combined number of votes that would just about fill the University of Michigan’s football stadium.
If she Mondale-lost, or even Dukakis-lost, there’d be some reason to blow it all up and start over. But she didn’t.
dogwood
@FlipYrWhig:
The lesson that Democrats have to learn is that the Obama coalition was not transferable the way we thought it would be. I don’t think anyone could have held it together. I’m sure this breaks the President’s heart because it was never his intent for it to be his coalition. The Reagan coalition was transferable. Republicans haven’t had a candidate of Reagans caliber for decades but the group is hanging together and dominating government.
Felonius Monk
Trump beat Hillary to win the state of Michigan by 13,225 votes. Jill Stein received 50,686 votes. Do the math.
Felonius Monk
@PJ: Pull your head out of your ass, please. For your own sake.
Mike in dc
I think the party should make changes to the fundraising rules, and members should voluntarily sign on to them:
1. No contributions larger than 500 dollars
2. No contributions from corporate officers, billionaires or lobbyists
3. No corporate contributions or sponsorships
4. No speeches by active members or recent members for large sums of money
I recognize that this is a handicap to fundraising, but it does insulate the party from allegations of being in the pocket of wall street etc.
Also, massively enhanced (to the point of paranoia) cyber security, good enough to stop a concerted effort by a foreign power.
CaseyL
@Cain: I am all for this. I’ve been thinking along those lines since Election Night.
PJ
@Felonius Monk: Good luck using that charm of yours to persuade anyone, or even discuss anything constructively with anyone. The “I’m right, and everyone else can go fuck themselves” mindset works for Trump, but won’t work with Democrats.
Gravenstone
@gene108: Not to mention he was mourning the death of his son just as the primaries were starting up. No way did the man have the mental or emotional strength at that moment in time to commit to a presidential candidacy.
PJ
@Davis X. Machina: Do you really want another election to be this close? I’m not talking about blowing anything up. I think the party has to start over from the ground up, winning school boards, state legislatures, governorships, etc. Otherwise, we’re going to be stuck with a Republican Congress, and a good chance of a Republican President, for the next fourteen years.
Patricia Kayden
@Omnes Omnibus: I notice that Daulney has not responded to my query. I suppose he knows that any response would be vacuous as was his claim.
@MisterForkbeard: White dudes better get over their feelings of entitlement. And Democrats better not indulge them in a vain attempt to win elections. I don’t want racists in my party.
Seth Owen
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Applegate looks good despite his loss. Not a career killer to lose your first race.
Gravenstone
@Daulnay: You do realize that a major argument against Warren (or any other sitting Senator) running was to prevent the potential loss of that particular Democratic Senate seat, yes? Granted, a moot point just now, but pre-election it carried significant weight.
Mike in dc
@Archon:
I don’t think we need to get a spectacular result. Just increasing our share of the white vote by 5 points would doom the GOP.
EBT
@PJ: Hillary was the second best candidate we have fielded in living memory. And the best is term limited. Deal With It.
Jeffro
@Daulnay:
Julian Castro, Corey Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand. Pick any two in any order for the 2020 ticket, start going door-to-door registering everyone who’s not already a confirmed D or R (AND making sure they have a friggin’ approved photo ID). Get behind everything Obama & Holder’s voter access project tries to do in every state possible.
Then for the next four years keep pointing out every last thing the Ryan/Koch/Mercer faction tries to do to fuck the working class and/or the Trumpistas do to fuck over everyone who’s not a white, male, straight Christian.
dogwood
@Mike in dc:
I think there are people who are serious about your suggestions because those money ties really concern them. But a lot of the corporate whore, Wall Street stooge stuff is just the stuff people say about their opponents. I wish more people cared about that issue but they really don’t. We just elected a man who will never show his tax returns, and a large share of the Democratic Party wanted a candidate who wouldn’t produce tax returns either. These issues are more than not just clubs to beat their opponent with.
Emerald
@liberal: On only non-violence working:
Armed revolution rarely works. When it does it’s only because the police and military side with the revolutionaries, which rarely happens. When they side with the state as they usually do, the revolution fails every time. Every time.
Plus, the first time an untrained/undisciplined person throws a trash can through a plate glass window or dog forbid, shoots somebody, trump has his excuse to crack down hard on everybody. He’ll be waiting for it.
Non violence got the British out of India, and got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed.
Study it. Cling to it. And organize under the radar.
Ruckus
@Peale:
Dead thread but a question arose in my mind.
Who in their right minds would want to immigrate to this country with Shit-Gibbon in charge?
fuckwit
@Ruckus: The people I work with– the majority of whom are immigrants– are already planning their exits to go back home. Unlike me, they have non-USA passports to make use of.
The brain drain will be horrific. Only upside is that rents will come down and traffic on 101 will be only slightly less glacial.
fuckwit
@debit: With their hands on someone else’s pussy.
James E Powell
@Mnemosyne:
I thought we’d call it Organica.
Another Holocene Human
@PJ: Fuck you, drive by troll.
James E Powell
@Linnaeus:
Here’s my thing: It was working. They had him close to a total breakdown. But then Comey came out with a letter and took the pressure off Trump for the last week and a half of the campaign. It was decisive.
James E Powell
@Ruckus:
Russian oligarchs.
jonas
@Gravenstone: I know — his energy policy is utterly incoherent. Not that any of his adoring coal miner supporters ever noticed this. You can either have a oil/gas/fracking free-for-all, or you can support coal. You can’t do both. Perhaps some kind of cage-fight between oil and coal executives is in order. On reality TV, of course. MC’d by Trump.
jonas
@PJ: Oh jeez, c’mon! I love Uncle Joe, but he would have had the same fatal flaw as Hillary — he’s a “career politician” and “part of the establishment.” Sure, he can speak blue collar American better than anyone other than the Big Dog (whose just-folks bona fides, you might have noticed, did fuck all to help Hillary, when he wasn’t making idiot gaffes and blunders), but that’s not what this election was about. It was about blowing up the status quo, whatever that means, and having been Vice President for 8 years doesn’t exactly label you as a shake-things-up outsider. Maybe I’m wrong, but Democrats were damned if they did, damned if they didn’t this election, it seems. Hillary was tanned, rested, and ready, but had a lot of baggage — fatally, as it turned out. Bernie was the radical outsider ready to take on the establishment, but couldn’t rally the broad Democratic coalition behind him the way HIllary did. O’Malley seemed like a decent bloke, with some governing experience but not too compromised, but nobody cared. I’m not sure who our side could have nominated that would have squared the circle of 1. voter outrage at the political/corporate establishment, who also 2. had the ability to reach angry, paranoid white men, and 3. rally Obama’s multi-racial, multi-generational coalition at the same time. I’m open to suggestions, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think that Joe Biden could have pulled this off better than Hillary. Plus, his son had recently died and he just didn’t have it in him.
Also, remember that despite this, Hillary WON THE POPULAR VOTE. Small consolation, but the idea that her campaign was a total failure just isn’t true. But she lost in key states where the anti-establishment/anti-insider sentiment was very, very strong.
jonas
@Mnemosyne: Actually, Trump did *not* meet or beat Romney’s numbers among white voters. Kevin Drum has been running these numbers and it looks like what put Trump over the top was a combination of 1. lower overall voter turnout and 2. POC were not as rabidly anti-Trump as we all assumed. Trump did better than Romney among both Blacks and Latinos (mostly men), if you can believe that.
ETA, which isn’t that surprising, actually. Hillary wasn’t Obama. Very few Blacks and Latinos voted for Trump, obviously, but not-being-Obama, along with the fact that working class whites (and not a few college-educated ones, apparently) hated Hillary with the heat of a thousand burning suns, put Trump over the top in some key swing states.
Macbethchick
@dance around in your bones: I like the Cookie Monster video version.