After last night’s strong performance in Kansas-4, there are a couple more special elections coming up. You all know about Jon Ossoff in GA-6. You can donate here.
There’s another special election in May in MT (statewide, it’s a small state) and the Democratic candidate there, Rob Quist, sounds great. Let’s throw him some money too.
Another Scott
Done. My e-mail InBox will never be the same after these elections…
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Doug!
@Another Scott:
Thanks!
Eric S.
@Another Scott: Scott, get a burner email address.
Great result last night. I’m hoping or side can repeat the success in GA, then MY, ad infinitum.
Chet Murthy
@Another Scott: @Another Scott: I don’t know about your email provider, but gmail supports the “+extension” format for mail addresses, e.g. [email protected]
That gets put in the inbox of “john.doe”, but the recipient address remains the long one, so you can write a filter rule to refile it into a folder. Which means you don’t need a filter rule for each sender, but only for each “category”. [as far as I remember, this -is- in the RFC, so it should continue to work “forever”]
I recall that moveon (I think) didn’t accept these addresses. But almost everywhere else does.
Marcopolo
@Eric S.: Second the create a gmail or whatever email just for political stuff.
And still the only person waiting for the doors to open for my senator’s townhall. Doors open in 15 it starts an hour later. I am obviously in an enthusiasm challenged area of the universe.
Another Scott
@Chet Murthy: I like belly-aching about it. It’s not a big deal for me, really.
Ossoff has some sort of 4x match going on now if you donate in response to some of their e-mails. I don’t know if the match applies to these Thermometer things or not – it would be great if it did. I do wish they’d be upfront with us though – don’t tell us that the 3x or 4x match ends in X hours if it keeps going on for months and months… The Doom and Gloom!!11 is annoying as well, also too, but I guess they think it works.
Fingers crossed!
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Marcopolo: Maybe you’ll get a personal audience.
Another Scott
@Marcopolo: Thanks for showing up. It’s important!
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
thanks for adding the Montana dude.
Marcopolo
So the doors opened and finally 5 folks had showed up–all from St. Louis, and four of us with Indivisible groups. There is seating for 325 people–I think all the seats will be filled.
Kristine
@Another Scott: I’m going to try this with the Mac mail address. That’s where all my political, shopping, etc email goes, and the rules don’t always work properly.
Percysowner
@Marcopolo: I have 3 email accounts. One for my fun social online stuff, one for things related to my home and my actual life and a third for politically related material. When I get overwhelmed, I just ditch everything in the political folder. It keeps me sane.
MomSense
@Marcopolo:
Yes! This is what democracy looks like! I’ve got a little cheering section set up for you.
guachi
As a former Montanan, I believe strongly the Montana seat is winnable. Montana isn’t as conservative crazy (yet) as Wyoming and Idaho are and Democrats can still win state wide.
For example, prior to 2016 the Democrats had won every Superintendent of Public Instruction since 1988. All Democratic candidates were female.
Democrats can win in Montana.
RSR
It appears that there will be a special election at some point in the foreseeable future in PA-10 (rural Northeastern PA) as the current congresscritter is joining the admin. No date or candidates are confirmed at this time:
https://twitter.com/adambonin/status/851989587643817984
The Moar You Know
@guachi: Yes, they damn well can. They’ll never be the most liberal, but they’ll never make you cringe like Manchin does either.
ruemara
I like Ossof but he’s pretty flush with cash. Let’s turn up the donations for Montana and get the good word out for him.
JPL
Since I have knocked on doors for a local city council race, I can tell you that Ossoff supporters are excited. They will vote. There are other democrats on the ballot, and much to my dismay, they have not dropped out. btw, Mike Pence left a message on my machine, and I deleted it after he said this is Mike Pence.
artem1s
Looks like Thompson is going to run again in 2018. I kind of get the DCCC strategy on this now. He had zero name recognition when he started this race and performed beyond expectations with about a $400K investment. Now he has both local and national name recognition. And the resistance groups that grew up around his campaign will be working on state and local races and harassing Estes non-stop on ACA and his association with a now very unpopular Brownback. It’s a lot like the Ossoff scenario where they went in hoping that he would get into the top two and be able to continue to the run off. They didn’t actually expect he might have a chance to get to 50% and avoid a run off all together. But the GOP big-footed it when they drew national attention to the race by putting out that wacky Star Wars opposition ad. If they had laid low the GOP would have been able to hold all their ad buys until the run off and buried a relative unknown with mountains of money. Now Ossoff is out fundraising the whole field and the GOP has had to bring in Super PAC money from Ryan and the Koch’s just to keep Ossoff from that magic 50% mark. And after KS last night there will be a wave of people piling on to help out for the next week in GA.
Gretchen
Let me just say that, as a Kansan, I’m really sick of the “Kansans are dumb as dirt and let them rot in their own stupidity.” We’re at Ground Zero of the Koch effort to throw unlimited cash at buying our political system, and still they only got their favored governor into office with 50.0% of the vote. There are a lot of people who are fighting hard to turn things around here. It’s easy to sit in California or Massachusetts or New York and feel smug about being in the majority. It’s not so easy in the rest of the country, and it would help not to have to fight your condescension as well as the Koch brothers’ money.
artem1s
@JPL:
yea, really. We have a clutch of Dems vying for the Governor’s race coming up in OH. I’m partial to one of them but really what I want to see from all of them is a vow to drop out the minute they aren’t viable anymore and throw all their money and support behind the leading candidate. If a candidate can’t demonstrate an ability to work with others towards a common goal in this environment, when the stakes are highest, they aren’t fit to hold the office IMO
BlueDWarrior
@Gretchen: You’re talking to someone who had to beat back the more aggressive Wilmerites on other, sites who howled endlessly about the “unfair frontloaded Southern Primaries” and how they were preventing the proper ascension of the great White Progressive savior.
(No one can tell me that they were ignorant to who exactly makes up the Democratic Party in the South, and it’s not just moderate Conservative suburbanite-types like several former Senators…)
Unfortunately if only the contradictions were heightened to a sufficient degree, the light would go on and the Great Workers Paradise would be upon us.
[What me bitter, what ever made you think that?]
Thoroughly Pizzled
Oh crud, I just donated to Quist, but not through the BJ link.
For everyone dealing with email explosion, Unroll.me lets you consolidate or remove all your subscription emails. Instead you get one digest email each day with thumbnails of all the emails you rolled up. It’s a godsend.
Steve in the ATL
@Gretchen: As a Georgia resident, I feel your pain. I get the impression that your R’s are crazier than ours, but ours are more corrupt. The only winning candidate I’ve voted for in years was Obama. Yet, there are millions of liberals in this deep red state, just as there are in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, et al.
manyakitty
I kept meaning to donate to Quist after the Editrix of Wonkette talked about him. Thanks for the handy link!
StringOnAStick
The field of people running to replace our term-limited D governor 2018 just keeps getting bigger, including my nice liberal Congressman Perlmutter who I suspect is just so burned out on DC/R intransigence that he’s ready to come home. He said at his announcement last weekend that he thinks he can accomplish more here than he can in DC, and who can blame him. Lots of R’s are lining up for the race too, most of them crazy reactionaries (no surprise there).
I do hope that as the race gets closer that the ones who aren’t feeling or seeing the electoral love drop out to clear the field. That’s my fear for Ossoff, WTF are the other D candidates thinking? A win for the D team is much, much more important than their own precious egos.
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: Just in case you haven’t seen this..
https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/852177975046963201
Steve in the ATL
@JPL: wow!
Parfigliano
@Eric S.: not great result….the dem lost…1 point 25 points..either way…its a loss.
Oatler.
@Parfigliano: “The beatings continue, but in a half-hearted, almost introspective way. Are wistful winds of demoralized remorse blowing pensively in-OUCH!”
dmsilev
@Parfigliano: The Democrat last night ran something like 20 points better than expected given the deep deep red nature of that district. Take a look at the House as a whole and ask what it would look like if you shifted every district by even 10 points.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I have sympathy, Gretchen.
I think most people know that not everyone in a certain state, county, religion, racial group and such are jerks or bigots (or wonderful and amazing for that matter).
And it doesn’t help that occasionally when someone in one of the broad brush-stroked groups complains, the result is condescension and additional mockery.
For instance, I think my teenaged daughter may be lesbian. I want to be the best possible ally I can be, so I went to the website Autostraddle to educate myself a bit. I lurked for a couple weeks and commented a few times in a supportive fashion. I read a post that just kept going on about how terrible straight men are. The comments were (some) harsh, too: “Men… they’re the worst; they’re loud, smelly, yuck, ugh….” I commented and said, hey, I get it, the patriarchy sucks, but some of us guys are alright.
The result was about 3/4 “oh, waaa, poor thing.” There were a few welcoming comments as well.
I now understand that if you’re in a group that’s being ragged on, if you don’t personally have the offensive traits you should assume you’re not being included and targeted by the jibes. Still, it does sting a little when you read “Damn old white straight dudes! Fuck ’em and the horses they rode in on!” (Or in your case, “Kansas sucks, screw those ignorant racist Bible-thumping homophobes.”)
Parfigliano
@dmsilev: tell that in 2020 to the DEMe when again KS goes Gop
low-tech cyclist
Last figure I saw for Ossoff’s fundraising, he was over $8,000,000. Folks, if he can’t win with $8M, then money wasn’t the limiting factor. There’s really no point in throwing even more money into this race.
Give to Quist in MT-AL, or give to Dem candidates for the Virginia House of Delegates who are challenging GOP incumbents or running for open seats. Lots of races at that level where a few hundred bucks really helps. If we raise another $5000 for Ossoff, nobody will notice the difference.
low-tech cyclist
@Gretchen:
I’m not a Kansan, but I spent a great deal of time in Kansas growing up – in that district, actually, in Arkansas* City and environs. My grandfather was a lawyer in Ark City, my uncle was a cattle rancher in Cowley County (and later a pawnshop owner in Ark City), my mother and my cousins grew up there.
So yeah, it’s been getting under my skin too. Although it shouldn’t take a personal connection. I keep thinking about Jonah being pissed off at God because God had compassion for the ‘hundred twenty thousand of Nineveh, who don’t know their right hand from their left.’ Nobody deserves to be othered and written off just because they’re in a state where most of their compatriots vote the wrong way. Hell, even most of the people who vote the wrong way don’t deserve to be othered and written off.
*Pronounced Ar-KANSAS, of course. Anyone who pronounces it ‘ArkanSAW’ has clearly never been to Arkansas City.
Mnemosyne
One of my Facebook friends had a link to a right-wing website (I think it was Two Right Chicks or something like that) where they were tentatively getting pissed about Trump’s constant trips to Mar-A-Lago.
It’s darkly amusing to me that the Republicans elected a guy who actually is everything they claimed Obama was: lazy, in over his head, spending taxpayer money on endless trips, not respected in the world, etc etc etc.
ruemara
@StringOnAStick: I think someone needs to say this to those contenders. What is it about? Your ego or a win for progressives?
@Mnemosyne: If I could ensure only their taxes went to his travel and upkeep, I most certainly would.
Captain C
@JPL:
Did Elliot Cutler move to Georgia and clone himself off a few times?
Parfigliano
@dmsilev: tell that in 2020 to the DEMe when again KS goes [email protected]dmsilev: yes if only 10%….tired of this argument….guy lost and……rember when HDean 50 state strateegy…and K rove barked and the Dem pqnicked
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne: @Mnemosyne: @ruemara:
I had an encounter with one of his “fans” his morning. He had a very successful summit with China and now the Chinese have cut North Korea off, they are no longer buying coal from NK, they are now buying it from us? He destroyed Assad’s airbase, and now that he’s shown what a tough guy he is China and the rest of the world are scared of us. No one is laughing at us anymore! I tried to interject, but immediately stopped because the avalanche of bullshit that came back was overwhelming. There was no point, he’s not just drunk on the koolaid, he’d marinated in it, he’s a goner.
@ruemara: This is why I read and sometimes post the ridiculous nonsense that’s out there, these people are real. Lenny is a retired cop who works as a security guard here, he’s in his late fifties to early sixties, Italian and totally batshit. I sometimes engage with him just to see if the glow is wearing off
Parfigliano
@dmsilev: tell that in 2020 to the DEMe when again KS goes [email protected]dmsilev: yes if only 10%….tired of this argument….guy lost and……rember when HDean 50 state strateegy…and K rove barked and the Dem [email protected]artem1s:
Julie
@Thoroughly Pizzled: LTTP, but thanks for the link to unroll.me! That is a great service and I hadn’t heard of it before.